administrator

Well, the good news is the techs are pretty sure they discovered the source of the instability over the last couple weeks, the bad news is that they discovered it only when a disk failed completely, resulting in significant downtime today as the hardware was replaced and backups restored. I pay a third party to host the site because they have superior network connectivity, maintain the operating system, and so forth, freeing me to concentrate on content creation. However, in the case of a hardware failure like this, we're pretty much at their mercy. Believe me, no one finds such unreliability more frustrating than I, and I am actively exploring options to improve it. I have been considering hosting this site myself, because it frankly receives an insane amount of traffic now and its stability would benefit tremendously from having its own server. Of course, the drawback would be that I would spend a lot of the time I can devote to this project to things like operating system maintenance rather than programming/HTML-writing, not to mention a significant increase in cost. I'll certainly keep you all informed.

I think there's very little chance of any further football discussion in this thread. This conversation would be quite legitimate in the hockey forum, so feel free to take it there. Drop me a message if you'd like me to relocate some of the messages in this thread to that forum to maintain continuity.

I don't like this thread already.

OK, we'll give this a try; there's a new "community forum". Discussions of interest to or about UND fans, UND, Grand Forks, and North Dakota are all on topic. Most readers here have a tie to that region, and this is a place to discuss and keep in touch with what's going on there other than sports. I moved a few things to that forum that seemed likely candidates for such a forum. Discussions of national politics are definitely NOT on topic.

I was honestly a little surprised by the overwhelming reaction (among those who chose to comment) in favor of closing this forum. The public sentiment definitely echoed our own, that this topic no longer has much to do with UND and that the lack of legitimate new topics to discuss has left the forum a host to little more than interpersonal bickering. However, it will certainly reopen should DI-AA become relevant to UND again.

The relevance of this topic to UND has played itself out. The changes in the NCC that prompted the creation of this forum are known and nearly complete. Discussion of UND's opponents is still on topic in the sports forums, so this topic no longer really generates enough legitimate traffic to need its own forum. Those of our readers interested in following UNC's, NDSU's, or SDSU's transitions in great depth would probably be better served by news sources devoted to those institutions. This is not a response to anything specificly discussed recently, I've been watching this forum's traffic for some time and have discussed it with a couple moderators and contributors. We would keep these posts around as an archive (so you can prove how prescient your predictions were) and would, of course, reopen the discussion if the topic gained new relevance to UND. We're certainly not trying to stifle discussion of topics of legitimate interest to followers of UND athletics, rather I think we're responding to a decline in news related to this topic. As these forums exist for you, the fans, we're interested in your opinions; any suggestions that this forum still has value will be taken quite seriously. If you have comments that you'd prefer not to post, feel free to send a PM/email.

Though how to view the Sioux on satellite is somewhat on topic, 4 unpaid advertisements in 4 different threads is probably enough.

I can't really comment on others' moderation philosophies, except to caution that moderating is very hard. We definitely don't have a laissez-faire attitude here; rather, we've tried to create an environment in which people can freely discuss the Sioux (from any viewpoint) by aggressively discouraging flaming / personal attacks. Our philosophy was born of multiple people's frustration with some boards in which topical conversation quickly gets overwhelmed with flame-fests (on USCHO, for example, any mention of UND last season was overwhelmed with dozens of replies of the exact same anti-UND propaganda). There are plenty of people around here who aren't UND fans and who frequently disagree with the Sioux fans, which frankly makes the conversation better when those people actually want to talk about the topics. Unfortunately, on rare occasions, someone comes around just to try to aggravate Sioux fans, not to actually discuss UND. There have been quite a few threads locked, a few people banned, but almost no posts deleted (only posts that contain racial/sexual/personal attacks have been deleted). I'm sure some of those people would claim that we're intolerant of dissent, I guess it's all a matter of perspective. FYI-- moderation is performed by JimDahl and GDM. We usually discuss things like bannings between ourselves before taking action, which probably helps add consistency and temperance.

The lack of a dedicated basketball forum is certainly not a slight on the sport, rather is a reflection of the traffic here. We broke out football two years ago because it's traffic began to dominate the "other" forum. As the site has traditionally covered football and hockey, it's not surprising that's where most of our traffic is. One could make the argument that there would be more basketball talk/traffic if basketball were more explicitly mentioned. To that end, I'll rename "other" to "basketball and other", but the real problem is that I don't want to break out the few posts per year about volleyball/soccer/etc... into a very slow forum.

We went through this last Spring, yellowdog. Please talk about hockey; ranting personal attacks against other guests are off-topic and won't be tolerated.

Future guests who find this site by searching for "Ed Schultz" be warned -- advertising is NOT permitted in this forum. Ed Schultz and his interest in the national stage is on topic because of his affiliation with UND athletics, and that topic will certainly include some politics and discussion of some of his competitors. However, blatant advertising is definitely over the line.

I know some people had intermittent difficulties accessing the site Tuesday night then again Thursday afternoon (today). We relocated the SiouxSports.com server earlier this week in an effort to improve reliability (the new network has more distinct paths out to the Internet, dramatically reducing the chance of a single failure interrupting site access). Unfortunately, there have been a few glitches. My being pretty busy with other projects this week has compounded the problem because I haven't always noticed the problems quickly to report them to the network engineers. While I can't guarantee that the transition pains are quite over, my expectation is that this will result in a higher level of availability once things stabilize.

Sorry, I have to remove any information that could be used to circumvent digital media copyright protections (no matter how trivial such protections may be) even though that was not the intent of the post. The DMCA (digital millenium copyright act) exposes me to tremendous liability on such matters.

With the NCC season just beginning, it's not too soon to remind everyone that the UND Alumni Association coordinates satellite game-viewing get-togethers across the nation. Watch what could be one of the final Bison-Sioux matchups with fellow Sioux fans (and at some sites, Bison fans) and tell them you heard about it at SiouxSports.com. If your city isn't listed below and you want to go undercover, you can also check out the NDSU Alumni Association's list of sites. Quite a few of them overlap, but there are a few unique. Check the alumni association's latest update to find out the local coordinator for parties in these cities: Atlanta Bismarck Boise Cedar Rapids Chicago Colorado Springs Dallas Denver Des Moines Duluth Houston Indianapolis Kansas City Las Vegas Los Angeles Memphis Milwaukee Minneapolis Minot Nashville Omaha Phoenix Portland Rochester Rock Springs Salt Lake City San Antonio San Diego San Francisco Seattle Sioux Falls Tampa Bay Washington, DC

Not ignoring anyone, just somewhat busy. To answer a couple of the specific questions -- this site is highly customized so we could enact any moderation scheme you could imagine; however, the exact problem of such a forum would be time-consuming moderation. By it's very nature (less structured) such a forum would probably require more attention; even supporters of such a forum agree that political discussions and personal arguments would need to be closely watched. There are only two of us and we're both pretty busy; I prefer to devote my time working in this site to creating new features rather than moderating. Regarding other topics, people already discuss here things like water parks, the passing of Ralph Engelstad, the flood, or other issues of likely interest to Sioux fans. I don't think we've ever been particularly harsh about requiring posts to be exactly on topic as long as they're not attacks/trolls. If the proposal is that such posts should be broken out into a "UND/Grand Forks Other" forum, that could be a pretty easy sell; rather, I interpreted the request as being for a USCHO cafe-like forum in which people would be discussing politics/movies/etc... which I still think are better discussed other places. FYI -- in addition to the posts here, I did receive quite a few PM's/emails against the introduction of a "cafe" (anything goes) forum.

I upgraded the forum software tonight. I've already noticed a few cosmetic rough edges that only showed up when running the forums against the actual data. I'll be fixing those over the next couple days. Please point out any glaring or serious errors immediately, or any remaining cosmetic errors after a couple days.

Thanks. They've been moving things around quite a bit during this initial setup but hopefully things will settle down soon.

SiouxSports.com will get a portion of the revenue from video broadcast purchases made via links from this site. Live video broadcasts If you're going to purchase video broadcasts anyway, just doing so through this link or the links on the hockey and football pages will not cost you any more but will help SiouxSports.com pay its bills.

Politics was introduced into that thread by discussing "pc" attitudes among various politicians and that actually did loosely relate to the Sioux name topic. It was only the last few posts, which were simply analyses of other positions/attributes of various public officials/candidates, that veered completely away from the topic of "Sioux Name". Despite the desire among some for an unmoderated forum (interest in which is being monitored and considered), that is currently not one. Normally, moderate deviation is perfectly acceptable and there is a lot of leeway in what topics are "of interest" or "related to" the forum topic (see Hockey); further, the Sioux Name forum does include a lot more political discussion than would be allowed in any other forum. However, when a thread devolves into flamewars or pure politics, it is usually entirely off-topic. Historically in other forums, those two topics take over a forum and it becomes uninteresting to the other 90% (again, monitor USCHO Fan Forum for a few days for good examples).

Sorry guys, too much politics, not enough Sioux Name

Yes, it's definitely censorship, the removal of objectionable material. I can understand why you can't see the objectionable content in any of h5322rsh's posts because h5322rsh appears to be a new account created by a banned person. This user ignored multiple warnings to avoid personal attacks, to discontinue his use of objectionable profanity, and particularly to avoid racially insensitive attacks.

I agree with PCM and Kent, a discussion about Montana between a UND fan and some Bison fans isn't very relevant to UND (the board's mission) or NCC teams' moving to D-IAA (the forum topic). Anyone here who actually cares about Montana can discuss that on some Montana message board.

Users can't directly upload files because it would be too difficult to monitor the space usage. We don't ever delete old posts (they're saved forever) so allowing embedded images could dramatically change the size of the archive. If you know how to attach an image to email, you can send it to admin@siouxsports.com and I'll host it for you temporarily so you can embed it in a post.

The personal sniping between members is not only way off the thread topic, but not of general interest. Email or PM are both better for personal communication that isn't of general interest to other members.

Always glad to help our Bison friends. I removed the search results post size limit so when you click on any username, then click "Find all posts by this member", you now get a much more useful list. I'm leaving the results/page limit at 25 for now for security reasons.