[R4R] Regarding the Speaker's Decision to Restore Fregerson's Citizenship

1. What law, government policy, or action (taken by a government official) do you request that the Court review?
The Speaker’s Office removed citizenship from an individual, @Fregerson, due to a lack of Forum or RMB posting. Upon discovering that the subject individual had posted on their forum profile, the Speaker’s Office restored their citizenship and stated "It was discovered that Fregerson did make a post on the forum within the 30-day time limit. Therefore, citizenship (and status as a Security Councilor) is restored."
Link - https://forum.thenorthpacific.org/topic/9191694/post-10763684

2. What portions of the Constitution, Bill of Rights, Legal Code, or other legal document do you believe has been violated by the above? How so?
Section 6.2 Clause 17 of the Legal Code:

The Speaker will promptly remove any citizens who, for over 30 consecutive days, neither post on the regional forum, nor post on the regional message board of The North Pacific or one of its territories with their registered nations.

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The legal code requires all citizens to post on the regional forum or in-game regional message board (RMB) at least once every thirty days to maintain citizenship. That is fundamentally not in question here. The specific issue I am seeking to address is: What counts as posting on the regional forum? The Speaker’s Office initially revoked citizenship as the subject individual failed to post on the regional forums or RMB for thirty consecutive days, however the citizenship was restored when the Speaker’s Office discovered that the subject individual made a post on their profile. Profile posts are a function that allows forum users to make individual posts on their own or other user’s profiles, outside of traditional subforums. Further, user creation of a profile post is not publicly tracked by the forum, via a user’s post count, or by the Speaker’s citizenship tracking infrastructure.

Older versions of The North Pacific’s forums did not have profile post capability, notably when the relevant portions of the legal code mandating forum or RMB activity were written.

3. Are there any prior rulings of the Court that support your request for review? Which ones, and how?
The court has routinely accepted R4Rs for the purposes of reviewing governmental action that may have violated standing laws or operates within legal gray areas.

4. Please establish your standing by detailing how you, personally, have been adversely affected. If you are requesting a review of a governmental action, you must include how any rights or freedoms of yours have been violated.
Standing derived by my position as Court Examiner.

5. Is there a compelling regional interest in resolving your request? If so, explain why it is in the interest of the region as whole for your request to be decided now.
This request intends to address a legal ambiguity regarding the status of a forum function that has never been traditionally tracked by the Speaker’s Office for the purposes of citizenship and is not publicly tracked by the TNP Forums as of this date. Resolving this ambiguity will ensure the citizenry knows what does and does not count towards maintaining their citizenship, as well as ensuring the Speaker’s Office is confident in legal grounding of the decisions they make to revoke citizenship in accordance with relevant legal code.

6. Do you have any further information you wish to submit to the Court with your request?
N/A

The Court accepts this request for review, and I will serve as the Moderating Justice. The Court recognizes @Sil Dorsett as respondent.

At this time the Court will accept briefs from any interested party, until five days from this post.

May it please the court...

There's more to this issue than whether a profile post counts as a "post" for purposes of citizenship retention.

First,
The Speaker's Office has historically reviewed members who have been flagged as having not met the posting requirements, and any post displayed under the "Postings" tab on the user's profile page is considered a post.

An example of this can be found here: https://forum.thenorthpacific.org/profile/5025161/#recent-content

The issue stems from Xenforo's treatment of profile posts, in that they do not increment the Messages count. I am the maintainer of the scripts that track citizenship compliance and I am quite aware of the limitations of them. The script checks the Messages count for the current day and compares it to 30 days ago. A difference means someone has made a post other than a profile post, and no difference means no post outside of a profile post. Therefore, I have made it clear any time someone is flagged for not meeting the requirements, the Speaker's Office is required to verify that the citizen did not make any post at all by reviewing the "Postings" tab.

Considering the old forum was last used in 2018, I do not remember whether it had a mechanism to post on someone's profile and whether, if it existed, it incremented the number of posts a user had. But the law was written back before then, so that is why I bring it up.

Secondly,
The removal of Fregerson's citizenship was the result of a glitch, where the "Postings" page did not initially show me the profile post that maintained compliance. I have no ability to perform root cause analysis into why I was not shown the post, but it did appear once I had viewed Valentine Z's profile. Had the profile post been shown in the first place, I would have never removed Fregerson's citizenship, and we wouldn't be talking about this right now.

To summarize: My action to restore Fregerson's citizenship was based on 1. precedent that profile posts are considered posts on the forum regardless of whether it increments the "Messages" number, and 2. the fact that an unknown forum glitch caused me to not see the post until I visited Valentine Z's profile.

Per LC 6.2.24, my actions were appropriate.

The Speaker will promptly restore citizenship to any residents whom they removed in error, if the error is discovered within 7 days of removing them.

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Side note: If you'd like to see the source code for the citizenship checks...

Most relevant files are:
https://github.com/SilDorsett/TNP-Scripts/blob/master/citizenship/citizen_forum_posts.sh
https://github.com/SilDorsett/TNP-Scripts/blob/master/utils/read_citizens_data.py
https://github.com/SilDorsett/TNP-Scripts/blob/master/utils/read_citizen_sheet.py
https://github.com/SilDorsett/TNP-Scripts/blob/master/utils/get_num_messages.sh

I file an amicus brief to plead to the Court to dismiss this matter.

I plead that this matter is out of the jurisdiction of the in-character (IC) Court.

I plead that @Sil Dorsett is not a respondent on the grounds that the Court has no jurisdiction.


(a) Forum rules

Paragraph 5 of the Terms and rules of The North Pacific Forum (https://forum.thenorthpacific.org/help/terms/) override the Legal Code as the out-of-character (OOC) governance of this web site. (OOC, also known as Real Life (RL) for those unfamiliar with real life ([note 1]). The relevant paragraph states that: "We may remove or modify any Content submitted at any time, with or without cause, with or without notice. Requests for Content to be removed or modified will be undertaken only at our discretion. We may terminate your access to all or any part of the Service at any time, with or without cause, with or without notice."

I interpret this broadly to mean that the owner (and relevant Administrators, whose authority derives from the owner) has ultimate authority on this web site, not the IC government, including the IC Court.


(b) Thenorthpacific.org (the "forum domain")

According to Dreamhost (the host provider for the forum domain, according to Whois), the forum domain is owned by "Proxy Protection LLC". I presume this is simply a name used to maintain the privacy of the owner(s) as is common practice. I also have the conjecture, based on the reference to Eluvatar in here, that Eluvatar is the owner, or one of the owner(s) but the ultimate owner(s) of this domain is not relevant to this discussion. [note 2]

Any content posted on the domain is ultimately the responsibility of the domain owner(s), subject to various laws in various applicable jurisdictions. Thus, the owner of the domain should be responsible for scripts maintained on the web site, including the use of scripts on the said web site. While such scripts, as @Sil Dorsett mentioned above, undoubtedly benefit the IC functioning of the TNP government, the use (or failure to use, or whether such scripts are fit for a particular purpose, such as the IC citizenship checks) is at the discretion of the domain owner.

If the IC government deems a script to be not fit for a particular purpose, the IC government is free to develop its own script, and to ask the domain owner to amend it. The Court is clearly conflating the role of @Sil Dorsett in his capacity as an Administrator (which is OOC) or as a programmer of the various scripts (referring to Sil's Github submissions above) versus his current role as Speaker (or his previous role as Deputy Speaker).



(c) Recognition of OOC contributions

As far as I am aware, OOC contributors to the function of TNP have not been recognized in any form in the IC universe, so similarly there appears to be no justification for the Court to rule on actions (or to impose any remedy) on an OOC issue. (Edit: this includes contributions of time, energy, effort, servers, or money).

My understanding is that Sil Dorsett has been recognized numerous times for his contributions IC by the IC government, but there appears to be no explicit the mandate of the IC government (under the IC Constitution) to recognize contributions on an OOC basis, as is Sil's case contributing scripts to TNP. (Eluvatar has been recognized via Turtle Day but that was for contributions to NS as a whole, rather than TNP specifically, and Delegates have broad powers to recognize anyone for any achievement in any case.)

[Note 1] For the avoidance of doubt for the any members of TNP or NationStates players in general that are not familiar with this concept, "real life" is when you log off from NationStates. Such fellow citizens may have experienced (to their horrors) "real life" when NationStates was unavaialble for several days recently.

[Note 2] https://forum.thenorthpacific.org/topic/9196003/

While I acknowledge that Simone's brief is defending me, I must point out its errors for the benefit of the court.

First of all, the scripts used to check citizenship are not hosted on any server operated by Eluvatar. They are hosted on a separate virtual private server that I purchased. I am the sole developer of those scripts and the sole operator. Any errors are my responsibility to correct, and that is outside of my roles of Acting Speaker and Administrator.

Secondly, the scripts are ultimately irrelevant to the core issue. My mention of them was for the court's benefit to understand how I reached both conclusions that Fregerson had lapsed citizenship and Fregerson retained citizenship, requiring an LC 6.2.24 intervention.

The citzenship checks could have been performed manually. In essence, I could have visited the forum profiles of each citizen, checked the Postings tab, and made a determination whether someone had not posted in 30 days.

However, there is a flaw in this manual way of doing checks. Not every post on the forum is visible to everyone. We have secured subforums of the forum, where posts do increment the Messages counter but are not visible in the Postings tab of member profiles if the person checking does not have access to that subforum. This does make knowing the Messages count from 30 days ago essential to ensure no one is wrongly stripped of citizenship. The only mitigating factor in this scenario is the fact that I am an Administrator, meaning I can see a lot more than a Speaker can.

The only thing the court really needs to consider is the definition of a "post on the regional forum". Is it "a post that increments the Messages counter" or "a post that appears on a forum profile's 'Postings' tab"? The Messages counter misses profile posts and also creates a dependency on scripts to capture the counter 30 days before the count is needed. The Postings tab does not show any post that one would not normally see based on permissions, but has no dependency on scripts. Neither solution is perfect, but I would argue that the one without a single point of failure like a r3n-style techocalypse is the preferred option.