jimdahl

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.

I was thinking PLATINUM gophers.

Would I get to be the mascot?

Exactly! I raised it as a potential mistake that I think they can avoid making. Though such a comment may seem negative, I'm not being critical of something UND has done (because it hasn't even happened yet), I'm raising it saying I hope they do it right.

I think the open nickname suggestion process was very well handled. The data dump of the suggestions was also a nice touch (though perhaps should've been accompanied by a note clarifying that it was an unedited dump). I expressed a couple concerns about things that I thought might go less well in the next phase (I would find an overemphasis on the availability of goXXX.com a poor reason to reject a nickname, and I worried about potential ballot stuffing if a similar anonymous voting process is used to choose from the final three); but those aren't things UND has done wrong, those are things I hope they avoid doing wrong!

I meant it as a not-so-subtle reminder to the UND officials reading the thread

Yep, if it's any sort of open anonymous Internet (like the name submission) the worst of the three will win. I assume they'll account for that.

I appear to have underestimated: 1) the importance of getting defensemen that would advance through the rounds, 2) Anaheim (my prior that Boudreau chokes in the playoffs, I guess).

Notice that: 1) Padilla CRTs registrations began as early as April 8, 2) UND specifically said names were excluded based on domain name availability, and 3) most known Padilla CRT registration were of the form "undNICKNAME.com" or "goNICKNAME.com" It wouldn't be the least bit surprising if popular names like RoughRiders were excluded because they were too popular (and thus had the undroughriders.com and goroughriders.com variants scooped up long ago). It would be somewhat ironic if domain name speculation led to UND skipping all the early favorites and instead choosing something unpopular enough that it was still available.

Sorry if I was unclear, but not wrong Since there's a lot of confusion here about how domain names work, I was trying to clarify the technical point that flickertails.com redirecting to undsports.com doesn't mean the former is owned by UND. I could similarly make siouxsports.com redirect to undsports.com with no additional cooperation from UND. Obviously, that point doesn't preclude it from being owned by UND.

Blake works Padilla CRT, the firm that conducted the nickname suggestion collection. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/blakehuntermirzayan). They bought up hundreds of the most popular names.

Yep, while they're unlikely to be speculatively buying up bunches now (unless the fix really is in), it would be ridiculous of them not to snatch up the names they want BEFORE announcing the final three.

It's just a redirect set up by the owner of that domain, doesn't require any cooperation from the owner of the destination domain.

Thus guaranteeing that only a name so unpopular that no one has purchased it as a domain name by 2015 can be chosen. I would hope they wouldn't be holding out for nickname.com.