Rishonomic was a short-lived EmailNomic in 1997 featuring a large helping of silliness. It died perhaps the most dramatic death of any nomic, when a TerribleProposal was adopted, along the lines of
Upon the adoption of this proposal, the ruleset is amended by replacing all numbers with the phrase "A Suffusion of Yellow".
Attempts were made to continue with the gravely wounded ruleset, but ultimately it was abandoned as unplayable. Many of the same players continued with NewRishonomic, which started with several of the rules that had been devised in Rishonomic.
In May 1997 Rishonomic came under sneak attack by infiltrators from Agora, in the RishoAgoraWar. The motivation for the invasion was a rule that Rishonomic had enacted early on which insulted Agorans. The invasion failed when an Agoran traitor tipped off the Risho natives. Rishonomic's death was blamed by some on the Agoran conspiracy, although the fatal proposal actually came from a native Rishon. Ironically, if the Agorans had succeeded in planting the rule they intended to in Rishonomic's ruleset, it would have provided a way to restore the ruleset to a playable state.
Unfortunately the account given above is incorrect. The Yellow Proposal did indeed pass and wreaked havoc, however it was not the cause of the crash! Shortly before that proposal passed there was no another proposal that gave the speaker the power to rewrite rules that caused a paradox once a Call For Judgment on a paradox was judged to be true. When the all the numbers were replaced with A Suffusion of Yellow it became impossible to post new proposals, since proposals were required to be numbered, however, turned out that there was no such requirement on Calls for Judgment. They just needed to be identified, but there was no requirement to identify them with numbers. So players started invoking paradox Calls for Judgments until one of them was judged was true and allowed me, as Speaker, to do some rule rewrites to fix the problem caused by the Yellow Proposal. Having passed that crisis we encountered a problem that had been plaguing us for awhile, due to unclear registration rules there was a problem determining the list of players. That problem is a very deadly problem for any nomic. That was the cause of the crash.
ps - the correction above was written by Uri Bruck - formerly Speaker of Rishonomic and New Rishonomic