administrator

You two have to settle down and take this to PM or email. Seriously. Stop.

Statement regarding GrahamKracker

As some have recently noted, the user "GrahamKracker" is banned from SiouxSports.com. This action is unrelated to GrahamKracker's participation in the message board, rather is a result of that user hacking into another user's account to fabricate racist posts. The hacking and the subject of the posts are clear violations of the rules of this website (to which every user agrees upon registration), and quite likely the law. We do not take hacking attempts lightly and have voluntarily fully cooperated with local authorities' requests for evidence regarding these incidents.

Man, another old-timer that I'm going to lose track of. Alright, though.

Taking "Bison" out of the name, eh? I guess the avatar still shows your allegiance. Done.

The talk has definitely been building... I'm perhaps a little slow, but it's alive!

Though I'm perhaps a month or two late-- the committee is meeting, UND's division classification is back under consideration, and the debate is roaring... Should UND expand the Alerus to become the largest football facility in the country, surpassing Michigan Stadium? Is Tennessee quietly petitioning to keep our women's basketball team out of D-I? Under Kupchella's proposal, can the men's basketball team join the NAIA? Can our lacrosse team really compete with the big boys? These topics and others related to division classification should be restricted to this forum. This is not an NDSU smack forum; discussion of NDSU's reclassification procedures and how they have fit into D-I are relevant, smack against Bison fans will result in suspension. If it turns into nothing but a smack forum, it will close quickly.

Guys, this discussion is over. The thread is still open because someone might actually want to discuss Kent's article, but take the personal war to email or PM or someplace it isn't polluting my message board. I'm serious.

I'm with ralph on this one, he was just trying to be friendly with the "as always, go sioux". The initial suspicion was understandable (there have been an unusual influx of poseur Sioux fans recently), but he's explained his seemingly conflicting posts more than adequately. In the future, when suspicious of Sioux fan poseurs, please just keep an eye on them and forward your concerns to me or a moderator, because the immediate assumption of guilt and this sort of response is hardly welcoming to new guests.

I don't know how to make this more clear -- everyone needs to stop attacking other posters personally and keep the discussion about the topic. Raising personal discussions about or identifying other posters uninvited is grounds for suspension.

This hasn't been about the nickname in at least a page and a half now...

I'm splitting this topic from the recruiting thread, should make both easier to follow.

Stating your opinion (criticizing Gopher/Sioux players) = ok Bigoted slurs / profanity = unnecessary The point of pointing out inappropriate posts is to help define an ongoing standard for discourse in the forum. That gets everyone on the same page of how to play nice (sometimes forgotten after a lopsided outcome against a rival).

I agree -- this is a good example of going too far. A little smack between opponents' fans is inevitable, but the bigoted slurs and profanity are inappropriate for a public forum.

Please refrain from "outing" people by name if they are intentionally using a generic handle / not revealing their name themselves.

In short... a reasonably catastrophic hard drive failure led to about a day of downtime (18 or so hours). There are very good technical reasons that a single hard drive failure should not affect the site, and unfortunate reasons that in this instance it did. The current site is a restore of my last complete personal backup of it all, made a few weeks ago, hence the age of the messages and missing interim messages. Unfortunately, the service provider of the server has not been able to provide intermediate daily backups. If such prove available, I will insert that data as soon as it is available. However, I'm not particularly optimistic, so wanted to get things up and running as soon as possible with what we have. Sorry for the inconvenience - Jim

OK, we'll give this a try for a while. At the bottom of "Community" seems a decent place for it, though it "below the fold". I considered putting it under sports, but it kind of seems more like community. Comments welcome.

Please avoid discussion of partisan politics unrelated to the Sioux nickname.

Please keep the racial discussion confined to topics directly related to the Sioux Name.

Physical threats against other posters have no place on this board. This is an emotional time on both sides of the issue, but please keep the discussion about the issue, not each other.

Moved this thread to the forum in which there will be more answers to your questions. Some guidance is at: What is smack? Moderation standards We try to objective, but we are all human so it's still obviously very subjective. A jab that would slip by at one time may be tagged when we're in the midst of trying to put out a flamewar. We may interpret the intentions of a poster differently in an otherwise identical post depending on which team is the subject of that post (see "What is smack"). We develop impressions of individual posters over time, such that a long-time contributor might get away with a jab that we'd call a troll if it came from a first-time poster. To try to keep things somewhat honest, we DO actively discuss ongoing moderation, threads, and individuals, and the majority of moderation actions are initiated after discussion and agreement of more than one person. Finally, we always welcome discussion (seemingly most often in the form of criticism) of the running of the site in this forum.

I'm honestly not certain why we've had such an influx of Bison fans lately, but the warning applies equally to fans of any team: This forum is a place for discussing UND football. If you want to either trash NDSU or praise NDSU, find an NDSU forum. If you just want to trash DII football, you probably don't belong here. If you want to discuss UND, bring a reasonable discussion to the table (pro-UND or not) and your posts are welcome. Slightly off-topic discussions of interest to UND fans are usually also welcome, but not this obsessive trolling that drowns out the on-topic discussions.

The personal attacks have gotten somewhat out of hand in this forum in the last day or two. If you disagree with something someone else posted, argue with the topic and content of their post, don't attack them personally. Individual warnings have been issued to some offenders, but lack of an individual warning does not mean you will spared suspension if you continue to violate this basic rule of the board (and common courtesy).

I removed posts with inappropriate profane and sexual content from this thread. Readers are likely to notice such posts before we do, so please continue to report inappropriate posts and trolls.