Hello from a new player

[Dev]

Hi there,

Just joined the game today, looking forward to it.

First, I believe I may have already found an exploit. I decided not
to use the bug to push through "this.Winner = 'dev';" as an active
proposal, but I'm pretty sure one could. I am not sure if winning
this way would be "breaking the metarules" or not, since it doesn't
actually involve poking at the server or anything, just a particular
sequence of actions.

Once I find the details of the problem itself I'll put together a
small explanation and maybe reduce a testcase.

--A Dev.

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[Adam Bliss]

On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 2:04 PM, Dev <inv.eng...@gmail.com> wrote:
> First, I believe I may have already found an exploit.  I decided not
> to use the bug to push through "this.Winner = 'dev';" as an active
> proposal, but I'm pretty sure one could.  I am not sure if winning
> this way would be "breaking the metarules" or not, since it doesn't
> actually involve poking at the server or anything, just a particular
> sequence of actions.
>
> Once I find the details of the problem itself I'll put together a
> small explanation and maybe reduce a testcase.

Hi Dev, and welcome to the game! As you may know, all nomics place a
high premium on new blood. :)

It would not be a violation of the metarules to use your exploit to
win the game. So if you feel it's really devious enough to be worth
the whole game, go for it. Then there will probably be a followup
ecmanomic2 with the hole patched. You have a few other options
though:
1. Write a proposal that fixes the hole and gives yourself some
points, then use the exploit to pass that proposal.
2. Post an explanation and proof-of-concept to the group. This
presents the risk that someone else here will use it to win the game,
or do option 1 eirself.
3. Sit on it for awhile. I don't advocate this option since it
doesn't move the game forward. However, there are a few conceptual
exploits that I've been aware of for some time and haven't done
anything with. This was partly to see if anyone else would notice
them, and partly because I was too lazy for options 1 or 2. :)

By the way, a small number of things work slightly differently on the
server than in the browser. For this reason I set up
http://ecmanomic.org/test.html which is a parallel implemenation of
the game. If you go with option 1, you may wish to try it out there
first, just in case something subtle causes the patch to break the
game. (I've also been using it as a testing grounds for a future
proposal I'm working on, but you should be able to ignore all that
stuff.)

--abliss