jimdahl

Ok, I've believed for a few weeks that though not a winning team, the Vikings were a dangerous team. However, I'm again pretty surprised to see the odds for this week -- Chicago is favored by only 1.5-3 (depending on your source). Again, the people putting their money on the line see some threat in the Vikes.

As I was putting one of my pools together this week and saw the Vikings again FAVORED by 1-3, I found myself pondering the lines for the season. By my best recollection, every one so far has been within a field goal or so (favored in 4, underdog in 1?). Even the 0-3 Vikes going into 3-0 Detroit was a 1-2 point line (game settled in OT by a FG). I don't know what my point is other than that the oddsmakers have seen some threat there each week, I really think the Vikes are a dangerous team. I think I'll (again) pick Minnesota for this week, so we might as well pencil in 0-5 already, but it will certainly be interesting to see what happens when that 0-5 team goes into Chicago, hosts Green Bay, and goes to Carolina with nothing to lose. At some point the goal has to switch from maximizing the season record to building for the future, which probably means getting Ponder tested/ready.

Among the improvements, I was able to implement both ideas from this discussion. However, in hindsight, just one (attaching the rep to the post but not the person) probably would have been sufficient. I'll try to give it a little more thought and tweak it in coming days... Off the top of my head, I could see reinstating neg post rep and possibly upping the rep/day limits.

While it's true that most of the improvements are on the admin side (last summer's upgrade was a big user-oriented upgrade), stuff I've noticed so far that users are likely to directly benefit from... - Improved mobile / phone support - Enhanced social network integration (e.g. you can now post with your Facebook account rather than separately register, or link your Facebook account to your existing account to autologin) - Better reputation / like functionality (that let me configure it to address a lot of the previous concerns) - Improved user interface interaction (better post editor / quick reply / more "AJAX" [interacting with the page doesn't require reloading the page as much])

Fixed. I migrated all the smilies from the old verison. Yes, that's one area in which it's a lot better, particularly on the most modern (iOS/Android in particular) devices. It's supposed to autodetect most common phones (and does in my testing) and default you to that mobile version (though you can always opt back to the full version). I'll look into why there's not a "skin selector" in the bottom. UPDATE... to get the "change theme" link to appear I had to reenable the default theme. Not sure why that's necessary, probably a bug, but it lets you manually select the mobile theme for now.

As usual, things might be a bit wonky over the next few days as I iron out the bugs, enable new features, etc... Also as usual, things are reasonably different, so will undoubtedly feel uncomfortable for a little while (I don't like Facebook "upgrades" either), though there's lots of good stuff and now seemed a better time than mid-season. One change to the software was it went from the old scheme of supporting both an avatar and a photo to just one profile image per person, but I unexpectedly managed to lose everyone's photos/avatars. I might be able to get those back, or you might just want to take this as an opportunity for a refresh.

Saw this first thing this morning... the two things I had to say about it: It was a fun read.

You know, I was actually planning merchandise (to the point that I have exclusive prototypes) right when the big name issue blew up. It didn't seem prudent to make a big push when the name was likely to change very soon... who knew it would drag out this long?

Please keep the debate about the topic at hand, and refrain from personal attacks on other members.

The Righthaven saga continues to bemuse... Righthaven rocked, owes $34,000 after "fair use" loss

I missed it! All the nickname chatter led to more posts per day than I was expecting off-season.

I know what you're saying... I've been working on a related big change -- adding a feed that tries to capture almost all the discussion about Sioux athletics (which would be a separate thing from the media/official feed). However, to make it work, it will necessarily try to (intelligently?) pick out the relevant tweets from thousands of people rather than just naively publish all the tweets from a preselected group who tend to tweet a lot about UND sports. I could simultaneously pare back the current feed so it doesn't include accounts that tend to include a lot of off-topic or personal tweets, leaving sort of a dedicated official/media UND sports tweets feed to accompany the general one.

Nice to see the idea coming to life! The easiest way to get your stories into the SiouxSports hockey blogroll is to submit the RSS feed to collegehockeyblogs.com. Then the stories will automatically be displayed as they're published. Best wishes in your endeavor, it's a fun idea.

Students Win NASA Moon Robot Competition

The playoffs this year have really proven the old adage that defense (and in hockey, the netminder) wins championships. I've gotta think Vancouver is favored, but the predicted outcome of the first post in the thread is still possible.

It would have been more impressive if you had predicted TB to sweep before the series began instead of after it ended. All the pros were penciling the Caps in for the Eastern Finals after watching the Rangers series. I think they just choked (again). Atlantic has the newest teams, so there's not the rich history in all-time titles or original six, but the Atlantic has won 2 Stanley Cups in the last decade, Southeast has won 2, Northeast has won 0. Regular season standings are pretty much a wash top-to-bottom, though an SE team has won the East the last two years. As a Sioux fan, this quote is all too familiar. Though the stunning rally to win the East again made for a fun regular season, the early playoff exits are getting old, and I'd be surprised if we didn't see some personnel changes this time. At least Philly also seems about to get bounced, so I will probably get to calm down and just enjoy the remaining games without getting too upset about who wins and loses.

Down 0-2 wasn't actually that frightening, particularly given the way the Bolts won game 2. Down 0-3 is. TB put out everything they had in the 3rd tonight, absolutely dominating offensively, so I would think odds have to favor the Caps in game 4 with just a 24 hour break. But, odds wouldn't have put TB up 3-0, so who knows.

You summed up pretty well when and why threads get closed. When people get in those emotional arguments, they never want to let the other guy get the last word so say the same thing over and over and over. The part that really bothers me is that when we let them go, those "urinating" matches stay at the top of the forum for weeks if not months. I want new or casual readers who visit the forum to see interesting discussions about UND sports, so after a thread like that has lost any redeeming discussion we shut it down. I still really don't think anyone was denied the opportunity to say whatever they had to say about the Kristo incident. Rather, the debate in this thread now seems to be more about whether moderation/closing a thread is ever appropriate (which is also a good question).

Racist slurs are a violation of the forum terms and rules to which you agreed when you joined this forum. Please refrain disparaging groups of people (e.g. based on race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation).

Yeah, I'm a little confused, too. Maybe my post was a little unclear -- I'm not trying to start any further discussion about the incident, I'm trying to discuss the decision the moderators made to close that thread. I personally think that people have had plenty of opportunity to say whatever they wanted to say about the incident, I'm just trying to give people who want to criticize our decision to close the thread a place to do so, because they were doing so in the middle of other threads in a way that was somewhat disruptive.

There still seems to be some angst (e.g. 1, 2), about why we closed the first thread about the Kristo incident. I'm personally a little surprised by it, in that the majority of the criticism at the time was that we let too much potentially harmful speculation occur (it's almost impossible to real-time moderate speculation and opinion out of an active discussion about a timely news story). Once all was said and done, the thread went on for over 400 posts and was open from before the incident even hit the news until after he was released from the hospital. We thought everyone had said their bit, there was going to be no additional news, and the thread devolved in the way such controversial threads usually do into people complaining about the existence of the thread itself and taking shots at each other, so we closed it down. What am I missing? There's been a lot of Kristo-related discussion since then that stayed open. Is there actually some discussion to be had there that we're stifling by closing that one thread that had clearly run its course?

This is awesome. Pitt. - Tamba Bay Philly - Buffalo Vancouver - Hawks All going to game 7. Those are going to be three great games.

Phoenix Coyotes sign Brett Hextall -- AZCentral.com

True. We get the Caps games on local channels, anyway, so there's no good reason not to try to show a little more diversity on Vs. However, when 1 vs. 8 is New York vs. Washington, the TV market appeal is pretty much unbeatable. Combine that with the usual tendency to trot out the teams with individual stars (e.g. Pittsburgh, Washington) for a national audience, and we're lucky that there's coverage of any other series. Don't worry, though, this is where the series usually gets good when the Caps defy all odds and manage to drop three in a row in 2OT As I said above, though, congrats to Detroit on a sound thumping. Some people think battling through adversity in these rounds is useful, I think demonstrating that you're head and shoulders above the competition is even better.