I believe encoding schemes should be banned. They are against the spirit of codenames (which is to guess associated words from a clued words based on the meaning of the words) and there is no elegant way to prevent an arms race of clever encoding schemes. But even if there was I would want to prohibit them anyway.
I'm not sure if there is a rigorous way to do this (other than prohibiting spymasters from seeing the discussions of the spies, but I definitely don't want to go that far.) I think an "I know it when I see it" approach will work quite well.
The types of things I would like to prohibit are anything resembling: "If you clue for X we will interpret that as meaning Y". This can be refined as necessary. I think spies should probably be allowed to keep a queue of words that they want to guess.
To be super-clear, this is in no way whatsoever a criticism of those who have come up with some great encoding schemes. Awesome job to you guys!! You deserve the benefits they get you this game.
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