administrator

You know, we actually had an HTML-based chat room back in 98. I was pretty proud of that script -- used nothing but standard HTML and reloads so worked really well and fast in all browsers. I think I remember Taz, Elmduf, Clayton, among others being around in some of those chats. I've pondered adding a chat function, mostly for game times. These days, it's a little less integrated but almost makes more sense just to use AOL IM or Yahoo IM to set up a private chat room, if there's really much interest. Something to keep in mind as next Fall approaches, anyway.

Using the standard I explained above, we determined that the Siouxrocks' content to noise ratio far too heavily favored noise, warned him of that, and gave him a chance to correct it. He did not, so his posting privileges have been revoked for now. Content = on topic opinions, news, discussion (again, there is no requirement that opinions agree with anyone in particular) Noise = personal attacks, generalizations with no support (e.g. "Team X sucks" as an entire post), discriminatory remarks or insults

I guess I see a peripheral relationship to Sioux hockey in those threads. I can be more precise (though less concise) by restating it, "posts have to be about subjects that the moderators deem to be of likely interest to a broad group of Sioux hockey fans". The average Sioux fan is probably interest in hockey in Fargo, who is going to win the Hobey, etc... Hmmm.... I would have classified about 5 out of 800 as very few in number, not "alot". Regardless, I'll try to give a general answer in saying that each was most likely no longer about Sioux hockey (or other topics of general interest), rather they had become personal sniping between a very small number of users, hence of limited general interest. It certainly had nothing to do with too many people being down on the Sioux or any other requirement for standardized opinions. I agree. I don't believe a post has ever been deleted or a person kicked out because they disagreed with any sort of "party line"; in fact, if you browse the forums you'll see that some of the regular Sioux fans here get upset that opposing teams' fans who come here to taunt AREN'T kicked out (as Sioux fans who taunt on POI have been). Given that, I guess I don't understand your concern; I don't recall a single Gopher fan ever being banned to date, and there are PLENTY of threads that contain a lot of anti-Sioux bias. I'll assume you were genuinely looking for clarification of what are admittedly fluid and subjective moderation policies, so I'm glad to post here because it may be of interest to others. If you actually want to debate those policies, I'd prefer you send me an email.

Again, sorry to moderate so actively lately, but the influx of opposing teams' fans coinciding with the Sioux getting eliminated has led to record high interpersonal bickering that is not of general interest. I do want to urge everyone to continue to try to avoid personal attacks because they're sure to provoke a response in-kind. We're keeping a very close eye out lately and we will make sure that anyone who's not really here to talk about Sioux hockey will not be around long; your best response is to stay on topic yourself (or drop a private message to me or GDM if you feel we've missed something).

Alright, this thread is dying too. (Yes, I'm being a hardass today, trying to get the hockey talk back above 80% in this forum).

This thread doesn't seem of public interest. Perhaps it would be better in email or PM?

Alright, I moved the football talk to the football forum. Go there to comment on it. Stay here to talk hockey.

Alright, it's time to start cleaning house and try to make this forum tolerable to read again. Here's your one warning: these few word posts with no content add nothing to the discourse so will stop, either voluntarily or not.

Sorry about the April 2, 2003, downtime. It ended up totaling about 11 hours which wiped out most of the day for CST users. Though if you're reading this, the site is clearly up, it would not be surprising to experience additional downtime in the next few days. For those interested in details, a number of things went wrong that contributed to the long delay-- as a critical PHP/SQL security update was being applied, the data center that hosts the computer on which SiouxSports.com resides had a few computers hacked with anti-war propaganda (though the SiouxSports computer was unaffected). Addressing those hacks resulted in chaos in the data center as the techs realized they needed to rebuild a couple critical DNS machines and others from backups. An unrelated event on the SiouxSports computer took the back seat for a few hours as critical systems were brought back online. Fortunately, we were able to use the long delay to recover ALL the SiouxSports data (the last full backup was Mar 25), so no messages were lost. Though not quite "the perfect storm", this extensive downtime was the result of 3 unrelated incidents, so hopefully we'll be able to avoid such long unavailability in the future.

This thread, who you think will win, exactly duplicates this one. And, of course, there's also a spot to choose who you want to win.

FYI, GDM and I are sick of it, too. It's not that it's gone unnoticed, rather that I'm assuming it's a temporary symptom of short tempers among some Sioux fans following a disappointing season and of taunting from some Gopher fans at the zenith of a good post-season. I always think most people have some capacity to self police, so try to give a lot of short term leeway. I hope from the last few posts that people have already calmed down. I mostly just wanted to assure you that we won't allow this sort of discourse to become the long term norm here.

I realize the topics are intertwined so it's going to come up, but I wanted to remind everyone to make an effort to keep the pure D-IAA talk in the designated forum. There are some people interested in UND football but NOT interested in reading debate about NDSU's move (and the discussion of NDSU's D-IAA move leads to more more personal confrontation, which I like to try to keep out of the designated sports forums). Clearly that jimdahl guy is as guilty as anyone, so no one should take it as a personal rebuke, rather a gentle reminder.

I want my point to be clear, so I'm going to be a little repetitive: I have no problems with multiple family members having accounts or frequent posters wanting to make a controversial post under a different name, which is why I have not yet taken technical countermeasures to combat this problem. I DO have a problem with a single individual registering 15-20 times in the last 5 days (each time taking steps to conceal that the registrations came from the same individual) for the sole purpose of stuffing ballots. If the above doesn't describe you, then I'm not talking to you. If the above does describe you but you think I can't tell all those registrations were from one individual, you're wrong.

There isn't a rule against multiple accounts being registered by the same computer or email address, and I hope to keep it that way. It's convenient to allow different family members have their own account, and so forth. However, I really don't understand the pro-Ranfranz multiple registration/ballot stuffing that's occurring in every poll. The point of these polls is just to take the pulse of the community, what possible benefit is there to trying to obscure or distort that? It's not like the poll has anything to do with whom Blais actually starts. I'm not going to take any steps to prevent this right now, but please consider what you're hoping to accomplish and whether it's worth making the results of these polls meaningless, as everyone now knows they are.

You're right, the dot indicates that you've posted in that topic. Kind of handy for checking for replies to your posts, and not particularly intrusive if you don't find it useful.

There currently isn't a restriction on the amount of time you can edit/delete a post. I've considered setting a limit, but there hasn't really been a problem (as far as I know). As long as it doesn't cause problems, I'd prefer to leave people the maximum flexibility to make changes.

Wow, I'm really very sorry about that. I even double-checked the active list ahead of time to make certain no one was in the middle of composing a post. I guess if you were composing throughout the entire show, it thought you were idle for 30 minutes so didn't list you as active anymore. My fault for doing maintenance on coach's show night, I guess.

Obviously the "skin" (look & feel) of the forums have changed. In all honesty, I don't actually prefer this look to the old one for the board itself, but it allows me to keep a consistency (such as the navigation bar and the color scheme) throughout the entire site. It's also a lot less graphically intensive than the old skin, so should reduce page load times. As with any such transition, point out anything that seems broken or send me any comments.

I don't post updates here enough when new features spring up around the site. This article (from a couple weeks ago) highlights a lot of the recent changes: http://siouxsports.com/hockey/articles/10 Since then, there are also the: WCHA what-if calculator and possibilities page. Coming soon: Change in look/page structures (you've probably seen this as it has now trickled into the main hockey page) Updated forum software (this will include a new look for the forums that matches new design mentioned above)

OK, it's fixed. You should be able to change your time zone now.

I think (s)he was speaking figuratively. The moderators have never had to ban an avatar.

The tricky part is that it's pretty integrated into the rest of the site. A PHP script reads the site's season database to determine what conference games each team has played, the results of those games, and what games are remaining. From that data it's able to calculate the current Pts, GP, and generate the team tables of remaining games. The PHP script spits out the page that you see when you view the page source. As users predict game outcomes, the JavaScript within the page scans the team tables to update the Pts and GP in the standings table. However, without the base Pts, GP, and regenerated team tables each week as spit out by the PHP script, it would be reasonably useless. That said, I'm always glad to give further technical info to anyone interested.

SDSUFAN has been completely unable to create a post that has any substance related to the topic on hand, but has repeatedly attacked Grand Forks and UND. Given that he has had many warnings to regulate the contents of his own posts and that he has only responded to those warnings with further attacks, I have removed his string of meaningless posts from the end of this thread and revoked his posting privilege.

I didn't want to leave a response to a quote for which there was no longer context. May have been the wrong decision, but I wanted to act quickly. I really do hate moderating, which is why there will not be another warning.

No more Nazi slander towards UND and it's fans (or NDSU, or anyone else!) Please keep the insults back in the "hayseed, Barney Fife" vein. I deleted the offending post and replies to it. This is the first and final warning on this topic for the original poster.