jimdahl

I understand that computers at UND are having a tough time connecting to SiouxSports.com this morning. There's apparently a routing problem in Atlanta (where traffic between UND and SiouxSports.com passes through) causing the difficulty. Your computer is fine and SiouxSports.com is fine, so there's not much we can do other than wait for the people at the Atlanta data center to clear it up. It's not like there's anything big going on in Siouxland today, anyway, right?

Since the 2007 football schedule thread (along with the hockey recruits thread) was one of the two that inspired to me think there were topics better served by a combination of a page and a discussion thread, I've been tracking the discussion on the 2008 football schedule wiki page. I also added a link to that to the first post in the thread so newcomers don't need to parse the thread to discover everything currently known about the schedule.

That's a good way to put it. The message board organizes all information submitted to it in the same two ways: posts are listed in the order they were made, and threads are listed in the order of most recent post. The wiki allows you to create whatever organization of data is appropriate for the given information. A list of recruits, a table of games, a list of frequently asked questions, a narrative history of the nickel trophy, etc....

What's the wiki? Why? There are a lot of topics that don't lend themselves well to a message board thread, but are more useful in page format. I'll use hockey recruiting as an example. There's a lot of discussion about recruits in the message board and some news in Herald's blog, which are great for keeping up day-to-day on what the recruits are up to. But if you aren't reading those sources daily and just want to find a list of who is in the incoming class of 2009, that's really hard to extract from a message board thread. By instead making a wiki page for a topic like that, when a new recruit commits, someone in the community (anyone!) just pops over to the page and updates the list. It's no harder than posting in a thread, but provides a different view of that information. That's just one example, the wiki is a wide-open space for anyone interested in the Sioux to make any pages they think are useful.

I've linked to the Sioux recruits page from the hockey front page under People. The recruits page is a good example of where I think the wiki is highly useful. It's information best maintained in a page, instead of having to dig through a message board thread, but where there's an advantage to letting the entire community contribute. As some of the other pages mature, I hope to be able to similarly integrate them throughout the site. That should also help continue to raise the profile of the wiki as a resource, which is important given that the value of a wiki rises with the number of readers/contributors.

Oh, oh, I wanna play. Is the person you're thinking of Canadian? If so, it's not that hard to figure out if you dig deep enough.

Good question. I stole it and posted it with more choices, out on the Front Page. Continue to vote here, too, but that one should get a lot more foot traffic.

I remember a bit where the comedian said: "The Washington Bullets" are changing their name to try to shed the association with crime. From now on they will just be known as "The Bullets".

In short -- we could keep it, but wouldn't. The NCAA can punish UND for the actions of boosters (which could include media such as this), but in this instance has not expressed any interest in doing such. That said, I'm more prone to pragmatism than nostalgia, and can't currently think of any good reason to keep an obsolete name. We'll follow the wind.

The board will be down for an hour or so at about 7:00pm CT, Monday, November 26. To better deal with the ever-increasing traffic, I'm going to try to move the forum over to a new server. This is a rather experimental first step in what may be a series of changes, which you should only notice in the form of infrequent downtime like this.

Virg wants your nickname ideas I've already pointed out this thread and a couple others to him, but now's your chance to get personal credit for your idea.

I'd be pleasantly surprised if we kept possession into the 2nd, but if that's the only score GVSU gets in the 1st, I'll be pretty happy with the quarter. In contrast to some of the other opinions in the thread, the Sioux have generally looked a little tighter, IMHO.

The first decent snap on a punt and the punter shanks it almost straight to the sideline. Good stuff. Edit -- I love how the camera guys go crazy on the webcast during commercial breaks.

I have to admit, I don't understand this thread. NDSU is in the wrong division to be eligible for a bowl bid -- they're in FCS (football championship = the division that has a championship), not BCS (bowl championship = the division that gets invited to bowl games).

Then we can be just like Brockway, Ogdenville and North Haverbrook!

Haven't seen this linked yet in this thread: Chappell status will remain mystery Bakken's view is:

I assure you that I wasn't thinking of medium-density townhouses when I made that post. Sigh. Update: Oh, and we're only #3, behind New Hampshire and Nevada: http://www.time.com/time/2007/america_numbers/alcohol.html Only 36g/year? That's less than a pint a day. Our average must be dragged down by some teetotalers.

No surprises there -- the winner of the Winona @ UND game is treated with a trip to Grand Valley St. I'd almost rather have a #5 seed and get another shot at UNO earlier. Wouldn't a win at GVSU, to even the all-time series, be a nice way to leave D-II? Of course, I get ahead of myself, as Winona undoubtedly thinks a win at the Alerus would be a nice way to send us out of D-II...

You're easily a minute ahead of me. I'll have to stay away during the exciting plays

I don't know what this means. That's not to discount that the poor server got a little overwhelmed last night, as I can see in the logs (about 550 page requests failed out of 600,000 total). It's just time to perform some resource upgrades, as is the case every year or two when growth continues to be exponential. Such a move will be pretty disruptive, so it probably won't happen until one of the holidays, but we've only seriously hit this particular constraint this once -- when there was this big road game. Sorry for any inconvenience it may have caused.

I also posted this in the game thread... UND asked me to share this with you.

A message UND media relations asked me to share with you all--

I, for one, am shocked... simply shocked to see a Bison fan endorse a web site that refers to "IAA". I assume a parallel letter-writing campaign urging them to update to FCS has begun among the faithful?

Occasional shameless plug: Dave's UND vs. CC preview is up in the blog Watch the front page for additional news and blog articles pre- and post-game

Watch out, Midwesterners. Totino's, Jeno's frozen pizzas recalled for possible E. coli