Game Changelog

This is a record of significant changes to the Core, Special Case and Appendix sections of the rules, which returning players should be aware of.

28 April 2009

Fair Play rules were formally added, replacing existing minor clauses about spam and multiple accounts.

18 August 2015

A Slack channel was introduced, eventually replacing the old IRC channel. (It would later be replaced with a Discord server in 2021.)

10 September 2017

The Special Case top-level section to the Ruleset was created and various miscellaneous rules that were previously proposed as needed or had been clogging up the Core rules were moved there from the previous Core rules.

12 September 2017

BlogNomic now becomes "dormant" if there are fewer than five active players, switching off until new players join.

8 May 2017

Proposals and CfJs now explicitly require a "[Core]" tag in their title if they are to amend Core rules, and the same for Special Case / Appendix edits. This is largely to prevent "change all X to Y" proposals inadvertently overwriting Core ruletext. (Tags were altered in September 2020 to be unnecessary in certain unambiguous cases.)

27 July 2018

The "Imperial Deferentials" Special Case rule, when switched on, makes Emperor DEFERENTIAL votes default to the majority (rather than being null votes). Such votes are often cast when a proposal is more about gameplay than game design, and the Emperor wants to leave the decision to the players.

23 January 2019

Core scams are no longer acceptable under Fair Play rules.

8 November 2019

The GNDT is replaced with an embedded wiki page and a separate dice roller script.

22 November 2019

Admins who hadn't been seen for two years were de-adminned for security reasons (see this post for a list of affected players and some context)

4 February 2020

Mentors were added to the game. When a new player joins BlogNomic, the Emperor is now encouraged to assign them a Mentor for their first four weeks in the game.

13 February 2020

Editing a votable matter after voting has started now invalidates it. (Proposals misprocessed by admins were exempted from this in August 2021.)

25 March 2021

Imperial Deferentials were changed to make player DEFs into abstentions.

28 July 2021

The edit window for editing posts was altered to four hours. (It had been two for a few years and was changed to eight a month previously.)

15 August 2021

If a proposal to amend a Core, Special Case or Appendix rule times out without reaching quorum, it now fails regardless of votes.

20 August 2021

The game adopted a set of recommended Community Guidelines for player behaviour.

3 October 2021

The self-kill terminology was renamed to "withdrawing", with no mechanical changes.

21 October 2021

Taking actions which are rewarded outside of the game became against Fair Play.

27 October 2021

"exerting full control over the actions of another player" for more than a day became against Fair Play.

27 November 2021

BlogNomic formally moved its discussion platform to Discord (having previously been on Slack)

27 April 2022

Declarations of Victory now require at least 2/3rds of votes in favour to pass, rather than quorum

2 September 2022

Mantle passing is now disabled by default, requiring a special case rule to be deliberately switched off to permit it.

4 December 2022

Players may no longer join the game or be unidled while a DoV is pending.

15 March 2023

Players who idle out after seven days in a dynasty now idle out at four days in the next one, and also have to wait four days before unidling.

2 January 2024

Special Case rules became Building Blocks, moved outside of the ruleset to the Building Blocks page when not in use

24 February 2024

Informal cross-dynastic favours were ruled out, after two players revealed that they had been privately trading them over the past year or so.

20 May 2024

Imperial Deferentials Special Case rule now removes the Emperor from the quorum count when they vote DEF.