Now that Beantown Stomp has sold out and we're on to a wait list, I wanted to quickly document how I've been handling registration. It's not perfect, but it works decently well.

People register by filling out a Google Form at which then drops their answers into a spreadsheet. I have the form configured to send me notification emails when people register, and I handle these about once a day.

The dance weekend is a month out, and we're filling up! In fact, if everyone who has filled out the registration form goes ahead and pays then we're pretty much full! [1] I suspect some people who started registration won't complete it, and we don't have a hard cap, so I'll probably start a waiting list in a few days.

Here's how things look to me right now:

• Performers: 15
• Volunteers: 14
• Dancers confirmed: 80
• Dancers unconfirmed:42

That's a lot of unconfirmed dancers! Sixteen of them registered in the last week, a few have told me they're not sure yet if they'll be able to make it, but mostly I need to pester them about paying.

Here's the rate at which people have been filling out the registration form. This shows slightly lower numbers than above because when someone registers for multiple people with one form, which I see about twenty cases of) that's still only counted once:

About a week ago Todd sent out a PR (#226) that would allow new players to join the game without anyone needing to approve their join request. This opens up a way to win: add enough sockpuppets to get a supermajority and have them approve a PR that makes you win. Specifically:

• If there are N other players, create 2N-1 sockpuppet GitHub accounts.

• Locally, prepare branches to add these sockpuppets

• Find an old PR of yours that was not merged and locally prepare to force-push an "I win" branch over it, to avoid the "0.6-block-recent" rule on newly created PRs.

• Reject #226 for a minor issue so it doesn't get merged when you're not paying attention.

• Wait until #226 is approved by everyone else.

• Quickly, approve #226, make PRs for your sockpuppet branches, submit them, force-push up yourn "I win" branch, have your puppets approve, submit.

We did discuss sockpuppets in the PR thread, but Todd seemed to think the threat was that if sockpuppets joined with 10 points you could win on points, and so it was sufficient to start new players at zero points. Or he was playing dumb, knew what I had in mind, and was planning to win this way himself.

Anyway, it didn't work out. I created my sockpuppets, sockpupper1 through sockpupper6. Some of these were flagged by GitHub, and while I didn't realize the implications at the time this would be a problem.

The first time #226 was ready, though, it failed to merge because it didn't actually pass all our tests. Normally you'd use CI to give early warning of this, but since we're (ab)using CI to determine mergeability based on things like having enough approvals you expect a PR to stay red right up until it's ready to go in. The way to handle this is to test locally, with run.sh, but it turns out Todd hadn't done this (and I hadn't either). So I was all ready with my puppets, approved the PR, clicked merge, and then it failed for a silly bug that only Todd could fix. Luckily I had been patient with the rest of my planned activity and hadn't tipped my hand yet.

The second time, once Todd pushed his fix and we had quorum, the PR did merge. I created my add-puppet branches (#236 through #241), but I was surprised when the first one failed to merge. It turned out that the allow-joining PR didn't actually allow joining. It had a bug where it checked you weren't adding a player who was already in the game, and while this check passes on master it fails on the PR branch and we require it to pass on both in order to merge. (Gah, Todd, test your PRs!)

I could have fixed this, since I had control of the branch, but then my PR wouldn't have met the very strict "add a new player" criteria and would still have been blocked.

I quickly closed my sockpuppet PRs and made a new PR (#243) that was obviously testing. I think I wasn't fast enough, though, because before I managed that Todd created a PR (#242) to require users to exist on GitHub for checks to pass. I haven't asked him what he was thinking, but my guess is he saw my PRs and thought I was testing the system, as opposed to trying to win with sockpuppets.

He extended #242 to fix the "can't actually join" bug and to require join PRs to be authored by the person trying to join, but then I ran into another problem. I made another puppet, nomic-user, and had them create #244. If you click on that, though, you'll get a 404. It turns out that PRs created by flagged users aren't visible to anyone else. Which means I would need 2N-1 unflagged sockpuppets to win.

That's not too bad, the flag notice just says to contact support to get the account unflagged. But then I thought before I did that I should look in the terms of service, and unfortunately that has "you may not have more than one free Account". Violating GitHub's TOS is not in bounds, and using paid accounts to win isn't fun, so we decided to ban sockpuppets.

At this point it feels like the game is winding down, with Pavel leaving and me starting to lose interest. Even though I couldn't turn puppetry into a win it was still a lot of fun!

I've been working on redoing our bathroom (plans) and after I finished the demolition (details) it was clear that I couldn't just put a new bathroom on top of the old framing. Not only were the original joists in terrible shape, but someone had removed a section of load bearing wall.

I brought in a structural engineer, the same one that did the work for our dormers, and he said we needed a header and two columns down to the basement:

Our third game of nomic ended quickly, before all of the players had even managed to join (#107). While trying to fall asleep last night I realized a way I could win: #33 gives a point per PR merged, and #49 allows transferring points between players. To keep someone from gaining unbounded points from transfers, #49 requires the total number of points to decrease. This also allows you to make PRs that reduce your points without anyone else having to approve, which is how I could have won last game (#103).

So what I realized I could do was create PRs like #112 that all consisted simply of adding the file players/jeffkaufman/bonuses/lose-a-point with contents -1. All of these PRs would be allowed to merge, but then the file would only be created once, and if I merged N pull requests I would expect to gain N-1 points. The key thing is that git does not consider it a merge conflict if two different PRs create the same file with the same contents.

This morning Chelsea won our second game of Nomic with a timing attack: