Beef Row wrote:
Lucky for Hartley, this post is ambiguous to whether he means the hairless cat or the tiger, and heck, ambiguous to whether he's claiming it at all.
I think
any post along these lines has to be taken as claiming; otherwise, if it succeeds, you'd get the point, and if it fails, you could say, "
Oh, no, no, I wasn't claiming anything."
(Compare
Mr. Slice getting the python by saying "Pythons are cool.") Erik requested that people be unambiguously claiming something; but an ambiguous claim, IMHO, has to be taken as a claim.
And, unfortunately for HartleyHair, both the kitty and the tiger were claimed already, so whichever he meant, he's out.
I'd also like to propose the following rule:
The OUT OF THE GAME PENALTY Rule
If someone who is "out of the game" makes a post that either claims or releases a pet, that post will be modded down three points. (The person can still post in general without penalty; but they're penalized for acting as if they're still in the game.)
and the following rule clarification:
If someone who has a pet tries to claim an already-owned pet, the claim to ownership of course fails, but the implicit abandonment succeeds. (That is, you can't end up out of the game and still in ownership of a pet.)
One might consider an "
inactivity escape clause"
for pets: if a pet owner doesn't post for a period of X days--that is, any post, not just a claim-or-release post--their pet feels neglected and escapes. That way the game doesn't hit a kind of stalemate point where all the pets are owned and people wander off and forget the topic. I'm not proposing it, just throwing the idea out there.
/dy
