1. Article 8 of the Constitution of The North Pacific will be amended to read as follows:
Article 8. The Regional Forum
1. The Regional Forum will be the XenForo forum located at forum.thenorthpacific.org, formerly http://s13.zetaboards.com/TNP/ .
2. Enforcement of forum Terms Of Service and moderation policies will be the responsibility of forum administration.
2. This amendment will only be enacted if and when posting is disabled on http://s13.zetaboards.com/TNP/ by forum administration in preparation for migration to XenForo before August 25th.
3. The Regional Assembly declares that an actual emergency shall exist when this amendment is enacted, due to the need for forum users to reset their passwords before accessing their accounts. This emergency shall continue for thirty days. During the emergency, the Regional Assembly recommends that no resident be penalized for failing to take actions for which access to the forum is required. This recommendation is binding on all government officials.
4. No part of this bill shall take effect unless all parts take effect.
1. Article 8 of the Constitution of The North Pacific will be amended to read as follows:
Article 8. The Regional Forum
1. The Regional Forum will be located at the XenForo forum located at forum.thenorthpacific.org, formerly http://s13.zetaboards.com/TNP/ .
2. Violation Enforcement of forum Terms Of Service and moderation policies will be the responsibility of forum administration.
2. This amendment will only be enacted if and when posting is disabled on http://s13.zetaboards.com/TNP/ by forum administration in preparation for migration to xenForo before August 25th.
3. The Regional Assembly declares that an actual emergency shall exist when this amendment is enacted, due to the need for forum users to reset their passwords before accessing their accounts. This emergency shall continue for thirty days. During the emergency, the Regional Assembly recommends that no resident be penalized for failing to take actions for which access to the forum is required. This recommendation is binding on all government officials.
4. No part of this bill shall take effect unless all parts take effect.
1. Article 8 of the Constitution of The North Pacific will be amended to read as follows:
Article 8. The Regional Forum
1. The Regional Forum will be located at http://s13.zetaboards.com/TNP/ URL TO BE DETERMINED.
2. Violation Enforcement of forum Terms Of Service and moderation policies will be the responsibility of forum administration.
2. This amendment will be enacted at the onset of the next Forum Access emergency.
3. The Regional Assembly declares that an actual emergency shall exist when this amendment is enacted, due to the need for forum users to reset their passwords before accessing their accounts. This emergency shall continue for thirty days. During the emergency, the Regional Assembly recommends that no resident be penalized for failing to take actions for which access to the forum is required. This recommendation is binding on all government officials.
4. No part of this bill shall take effect unless all parts take effect.
Alright, let me break this down. The actual amendment is very simple: it will just replace the URL for the official forum and clean up the language of the following clause slightly.[note]Forum administrators are, in fact, not responsible for violating TOS and moderation policies, but rather enforcing them.[/note] The implementation clauses that follow are a bit more complex. Allow me to clarify their intentions:
2. This amendment will be enacted at the onset of the next Forum Access emergency.
As the admin team has stated, when we are ready to migrate, posting will be disabled on this forum. This will trigger a Forum Access Emergency, as defined in Legal Code 9.3:
9. The existence of widespread obstacles that impede access to the official forum of The North Pacific, including, but not limited to, Denial of Service attacks and prolonged server downtime, shall be considered an actual emergency, and does not require a declaration by the RA.
Similarly, if we are forced onto the Tapatalk platform without warning, a Forum Access Emergency will be triggered then.[note]Because the regional forum is defined in the constitution by the URL, and the conversion to tapatalk will change the URL[/note] By making a Forum Access Emergency the trigger to enacting this amendment, we ensure that the constitution will be updated with the correct forum when we need it to be - no earlier, and no later.
3. The Regional Assembly declares that an actual emergency shall exist when this amendment is enacted, due to the need for forum users to reset their passwords before accessing their accounts. This emergency shall continue for thirty days. During the emergency, the Regional Assembly recommends that no resident be penalized for failing to take actions for which access to the forum is required. This recommendation is binding on all government officials.
This clause ensures that if someone doesn't have their email up to date and can't initially access their account on the new forum, they won't lose their government position or citizenship for failing to log in or post. Given the extraordinary circumstances, I think this is warranted. Furthermore, record-keeping is going to be an issue at first, because the forum migration is going to break some of the scripts that we use to track forum activity. We probably won't be able to replace them with working scripts until the new forum is online, and this clause allows us some time to get those up and running.
Given the high importance of this passing, I hope that there is no major controversy over any part of this bill. If there are any issues that would prevent you from voting for it, please post them right away so we can work it out. I intend to move to formal debate fairly soon (but only after the new forum URL is discovered, of course), given that Europeia was forced to migrate to tapatalk with very little warning, so we don't know how much time we have. This amendment will make our forum transition safe and legal, and avoid legislative grey areas. I firmly believe it is our responsibility as the legislature to pass this without delay.
Well, given that this is a legislative proposal, the motion to vote would need to come from me. I think it's premature, since we don't have a URL for the new forum yet. Once we do, I intend to move into formal debate, and will likely request to shorten it, depending on how long it takes the get the URL.
One issue with having that domain in the constitution is that I am the (sole) owner of the domain. It would be technically somewhat troublesome, though possible, to change that. As flemingovia and I are the 'root' admins at this point, perhaps this is fine, but I don't think I should be making that call!
Another issue, in general, is that we might not want our legal system to consider it to be the same forum if the admin team decides to replace it entirely without consultation. I would argue that we want more language, such as "the xenForo forum available at https://forum.thenorthpacific.org " or "the xenForo forum created from s13.zetaboards.com/TNP" or something clearer.
A historical example of the kind of mess that can happen when the laws simply mention a privately owned domain is the mess that occurred in the South Pacific when Hileville as DNS domain owner and Delegate created a new forum at thesouthpacific.org to get rid of the then-active forum admin team in January of 2016. This legal question may be illuminating. (Also here).
I believe there is yes, but we haven’t created the forum yet so we don’t know what that would be.
Edit: double checked and I am wrong. The domain name will be the file directory it is installed in and there is no default option. So the only URL would be the forum.thenorthpacific.org one.
I think specifying this to apply at the next emergency is slightly problematic: what if the current forum or domain goes down briefly? I would suggest instead specifying somehow that the amendment will come into force when the admin team locks down this forum for the purposes of finishing migration to a hosted forum. It might be appropriate to imitate the US Congress and say the amendment 'expires' if this doesn't happen before, say, August 25th (a week before September elections start).
Ok, I will take this all under advisement and come up with the next version of this in a few hours. Then I think we'll be ready to move into formal debate.
OK, here's the latest version (also at the top of the OP):
Forum Relocation Amendment:
1. Article 8 of the Constitution of The North Pacific will be amended to read as follows:
Article 8. The Regional Forum
1. The Regional Forum will be the XenForo forum located at forum.thenorthpacific.org, formerly http://s13.zetaboards.com/TNP/ .
2. Enforcement of forum Terms Of Service and moderation policies will be the responsibility of forum administration.
2. This amendment will only be enacted if and when posting is disabled on http://s13.zetaboards.com/TNP/ by forum administration in preparation for migration to XenForo before August 25th.
3. The Regional Assembly declares that an actual emergency shall exist when this amendment is enacted, due to the need for forum users to reset their passwords before accessing their accounts. This emergency shall continue for thirty days. During the emergency, the Regional Assembly recommends that no resident be penalized for failing to take actions for which access to the forum is required. This recommendation is binding on all government officials.
4. No part of this bill shall take effect unless all parts take effect.
So basically, we're defining the forum as the XenForo forum that used to be this forum. That way, if another forum was hosted at forum.thenorthpacific.org someday, it would not be our regional forum, because it wasn't ever this forum. I also tweaked implementation on Elu's advise, so that this only takes effect if and when the forum admins execute their stated plan to move forums. I think everyone is on board with this. I move for a vote, and ask that formal debate be shortened to three days.
We've got about two weeks left in the window to implement this. Does the admin team believe we will migrate in that time, or should we begin to revote on this with a later deadline?
While I'm optimistic that it would be possible for a migration to be done in the next few days, it would not be smooth enough. There would not be time for sufficient customization and testing. Therefore I think, barring unwelcome surprise migration to tapatalk, the move should happen after the Delegate elections, which would yes require a new motion. I would suggest a new bill not authorizing a migration by choice prior to the end of those elections.
