jimdahl

My grip on 2nd to last was becoming tenuous, glad to see it end!

Can't believe it's been like 12 hours and no has started a stand alone "final 7" thread yet.

The "RSS feed" from Brad's blog seems to be down (if you click the "RSS Entries" link in the lower right, it never quite loads anything useful). http://undhockey.areavoices.com/?feed=rss2

I wasn't a huge fan, but I'm shocked flickertails didn't make the 15. I thought it a pretty safe bet for top 3.

Not strong, tough, intimidating, etc... Sun Dogs Pride Spirit

To summarize the last dozen posts: North Dakota - not a new nickname (may lose on marketing and other reasons all schools have nicknames), forces media to create de facto nicknames (go green!), no closure (extends life of Fighting Sioux), some worry that the previous may run afoul of the NCAA, kicking the can down the road (will students who no longer care about Sioux demand a nickname in 5-10 years?)

Cavalry = no one knows how to spell it

Non-originality Roughriders = name of local high school team Explorers = LaSalle mascot North Stars = Associated with Minnesota (both former NHL team, and state motto)

I know there's been a lot of discussion, pro and con, in the other nickname threads, but I thought it would be interesting to gather a list of drawbacks for each potential name in one place. Though every name has some drawbacks that lead some people not to like it, it seems some are much a bigger deal than others (e.g. I don't think Red River High using RoughRiders is nearly as big a deal as North Stars being associated with Minnesota). It would be great if we could keep the discussion in this thread to a minimum (I'm hoping to just gather a list of the negatives), and I suppose we have to let profanity slide a bit. What's the biggest negative you can think of about the name(s) you don't like? Blaze Cavalry Explorers Fighting Green Fighting Hawks Force Green Hawks Nodaks North Dakota North Stars Pride Roughriders Spirit Sundogs Thunderhawks

The one that was a real wildcard to me, in terms of being the least expected to make this cut, was explorers. I expected plenty that I consider bad (sundogs, pride, spirit) to make the cut, but that's the survivor that was least on my radar. After giving it some thought, it made my personal "acceptable" list because it's unique, is a person (not a feeling or weather phenomenon), is nicely affiliated with the state, and has the potential for a cool logo. However, it's horrible in chants and announcements and has no obvious short version that can be worked into chants. (Interestingly, not being able to be shortened is actually considered a positive according to the committee's criteria).

Now that we know the actual final fifteen (it will be one of the above), which could you live with? Check as many as appropriate.

My first quick and dirty attempt at a personal ranking: I think I could live with 1. Roughriders 2. Cavalry 3. Fighting Hawks 4. Thunderhawks 5. North Dakota 6. Nodaks 7. Force 8. Explorers No thanks 9. Blaze 10. Fighting Green 11. Green Hawks 12. Pride 13. Spirit 14. North Stars 15. Sundogs Who else wants to play?

From the article dmksioux linked in the previous post: Blaze Cavalry Explorers Fighting Green Fighting Hawks Force Green Hawks Nodaks North Dakota North Stars Pride Roughriders Spirit Sundogs Thunderhawks

We get lots of visitors from China. They're clearly very big fans, as they carefully view every inch of the site, often even trying to view pages that don't even exist. They're so interested in UND sports that they even try to connect directly to the database, I guess because they're so interested in hockey that they want to view the raw data.

These aren't newspapers or radio stations, all web sites are international.

The weird thing is, I still don't need to do that (change it from https to http, or manually create the youtube tags), so it still seems like an issue of the browser inserting some additional data beyond the plain text into the editor. That's what the paste as plain seemed to work around before. Anyway, I've got a major update to the forum software ready-to-go and will switch over sometime this summer. That's where all of the vendor's development efforts have been focused for a couple years, and among other things it features an entirely new editor, so we won't worry too much about the quirks of this one.

We're letting the inappropriate post take over this thread, too. If anyone really wants to discuss moderation policy, please take it to the administrative forum.

Again, since it's 80% dependent on automated feeds (e.g. from GF Herald and UND athletics site), any problems with those feeds (such as misdated old stories) also show up directly on that news section. I had originally hoped that crowd-sourcing news articles would work, but the section doesn't get enough traffic/submissions for that. So, it really became very dependent on the automated feeds. Though it gets some traffic, I also personally don't think it's worth putting in a huge effort to find articles daily and manually populate it as I had done its first couple years. As described in the post above, since it's far less necessary since the rise of social media to spread news links and it never really took off (at least from a crowd submission standpoint) it will probably just go away eventually.

A fair number. But I agree that aggregating news articles is not worth it. When I created that section, no one used modern social media. My goal was to have it be a news aggregator like reddit (which also wasn't yet popular) so people who wanted to see more than just the GF Herald stories could see it all in one place. Now, no one is lacking for news sources and I think people are much more interested in reading social media commentary about an event than all 6 different newspaper articles about it. I'll probably pivot this site mostly toward the unique UND-specific content (forum and blog), while spinning out the generic hockey stuff (e.g. rankings), and also include a bit of additional social media (as opposed to traditional news sources).

Yeah, using the GF Herald feeds clearly stopped working some time ago, they're just too unreliable now. I feel like the news section in general would work if it were more used, because if enough people actively participated it would essentially crowd source the most relevant contemporary articles. But instead, it's now just 80% the automated feeds, which as noted don't work particularly well. Either remedying that or dropping that section is definitely on my lengthy to-do list.

Woohoo, no longer in last!

From the herald article on domain names... As I said, anyone who owns a domain can make it redirect to a different site. Doesn't mean UND owns the name, doesn't mean UND doesn't.

There's a fair chance everyone will lose their goalie this round, which would take away one of the biggest opportunities for big shifts in the next round.

Frankly, the likelihood that we'd start calling them "tails" (at least the women's teams ) should be sufficient to strike that name. Alas, gotails.com is already taken.