Under current rules, any rules changes (especially deadline extensions) need to be authorized by English moderation. At present, that's me. While gotMLK7 is around, he isn't active on forums and especially not in the trial-related sections. The motivation for this policy is the history of drawn out case competitions due to repeated deadline extensions. This isn't a problem for most competitions, but for those competitions where it is a problem, it can extend by a month or more. Similarly, there's a guideline about how long trial reviews should take, which exists primarily to discourage competitions from being dragged out while the judges prepare an elaborate "awards showcase" trial to announce their results.
The problem with this system is that it requires fairly heavy monitoring from me. I have not been keeping up with this, so the rare cases where there is a problem often slip through the cracks. I would also much rather limit my AAO activities to the ones where my experience with AAO is more useful: improving the editor and player, writing tutorials, reviewing cases, and making cases. It's true that monitoring case competitions isn't much, but psychologically, it makes me feel like I'm keeping up with AAO when nothing of importance is getting done. That, and I can't think of case competitions now without thinking of moderating timeliness problems.
Here's my personal wishlist for a new system:
- Minimal maintenance required from moderation
- Any new rules are non-technical
- Curtails major deadline extensions
- Clear expectations about how long results should take.
- If there is a long awards ceremony, there's a trimmed-down version free of in-jokes.
- There's no pressure to create an awards ceremony, especially long ones.
Deadlines:
- Once the judges have played all entries, they must post an estimate of how long until rewards.
- There's some hard limit on how long this estimate can be. (Two weeks, maybe?)
- Any awards ceremonies should have a "just the results" version posted in-topic.
Extensions:
- Hosts have carte blanche freedom for rules changes, including deadline extensions. The rules in the rules topic are binding, but everything else can be changed at any time, as needed.
- Moderation retains the ability to override rules changes in the case of abuse. (Hosts can't re-override.)
- Moderation can arbitrarily declare that the competition ends in a week if the new enddate is two or more weeks after the original deadline.
The floor is open for discussion.