jimdahl

Uh oh, that's strangely familiar... I briefly considered it. Can you imagine the uproar from the "logo isn't masculine enough" crowd if there were pink on the site? Hey, that's what I said...

I can only speak for myself, but I would certainly give the edge to whoever has home field in that potential matchup. We each have such a distinct home field advantage, that it would certainly provide an edge to whoever had it. If I recall correctly, we're 1-1 on neutral ground, 0-2 at GVSU, and 1-0 at home (with last years loss at GVSU again pushing us off the .500 head-to-head mark). I think a lot of people view the loss Finnerty as increasing the potential for GVSU losing a game or two in the regular season, creating exactly the conditions you described. All such hope aside, GVSU is #1 in my mind until they lose a game and we have to win our games before we start worrying about the playoffs.

That's the beauty of this wiki system, you can view the entire history of the page yourself. Just click "Old Revisions" at the bottom of any page to see its complete history, including every change and who made it. It's that plus the use of our accounts that makes it possible to do something like this without fear of vandalism or accidental modification.

Sorry about that. I was having a last minute problem with it not working right on the new "skin" so booted it rather than holding up the launch -- never remembered to go back in and get it working again. I'll take a look now.

Thanks for all the feedback, folks. The version newly there as of this morning has been tweaked to add a little tougher edge (comparison here). A little androgyny is inherent in the abstractness, and a very helpful design consultant informed me that the sleekness is a feminine trait (who knew?) Of course, the helpful design consultant also questioned the attempt to remove androgyny, pointing out that there are both male and female Sioux athletes.

Huh. There shouldn't be anything different, just include the page name in the double brackets. See the playground where I made an example. Test page 1 and Test page 2 both link to test page 3.

Maybe I'm just slow today, but I don't get it. You're looking forward six months for the final enrollment figures, Kupchella's departure, or...? I thought Shawn-O's point was a good one -- while people are quick to point out that larger schools aren't necessarily better schools (true), and that benchmarking against NDSU is kind of silly (true), Kupchella did set specific targets for undergraduate enrollment that UND has failed to meet. The "we're happy with our current size" standard is clearly contradicted by UND's own strategic plan.

The biggest two differences are that the message board is organized chronologically and that you can't edit other people's posts. The message board is more of a place to have a conversation. The wiki is more of a place to collaboratively create more permanent documents. While siouxnami definitely has the right idea and has been making great examples, I'll focus on one of mine. The "Sioux recruits" page is a page that lists all of the committed recruits. When something changes, any of us can go modify the page to keep it current. That page is then a useful resource that anyone can go to at any time to see all the current Sioux recruits. It's much harder to extract that information from a recruits thread in a message board (which I would expect to still exist and remain an ongoing discussion of recruits).

Such attacks aren't likely individually targeted. Rather, the hackers discover a flaw in some piece of off-the-shelf software and then search for sites using that software and take them over en masse. Though flaws are usually patched immediately upon discovery, it's still worth it for script kiddies to search for people who haven't upgraded or applied the patch. Small sports sites are likely candidates because they're often put together by fans with limited technical expertise.

It's been common for UND to double up numbers when we run over 99, uncommon for both to play. But what the actual rule forbids is: 2007 Football Rules p.FR-30, Section 4 If caught, it's a five yard penalty.

We won't have to close the thread if you all can stop the UND vs. NDSU smack now. Some people may still want to talk about the Sioux football game vs Humboldt St., and I'd like to leave the thread open for that. Bison fans who want to discuss the game are welcome, but those who are just searching for things to smack about a team they don't like ought to go to one of the other boards where that's more appreciated.

Eventually. While we're not in a position to please everyone, I want to give some consideration to the constructive feedback some have given. We've come up with a couple straightforward tweaks that we hope will harden the logo a little, removing what some may be perceiving as softness (femininity?) Though the logo itself isn't changing, if we can make a couple tweaks that improves the first impression for 20% of viewers, we'd like to find those.

I am, but not closely. At this pace, an update every 2nd or 3rd score should be sufficient

Alright, alright, I was just idly speculating -- didn't mean to call for an official census of the "logo is feminine" crowd.

I'm pleased to discuss something other than the new site design. Very pleased. A feature of the software is that it can track payments for subscription-based forums. This site is free and doesn't have any premium subscription-only features, which is why no options are available there.

Ok. I guess I won't put you down for a hat It's actually explained reasonably well here. The short answer is that we went that route because we don't think it looks like a little girl. However, I'm certainly not saying you're wrong -- if you read the thread, a couple people have also noted that they perceive some feminine, or gender ambiguous, qualities. It still fascinates me that not a one of the dozens of people I've spoken with about it live have seen femininity in it; to the contrary, when pressed, most point out the strong chin and sharp features as certain proof its a man. I wonder if there's some age, regional, or other bias to it?

Ok, I've taken a much bigger stab at it. I basically rewrote the layout of that entire page to be identical to that of the other pages -- there's almost literally no trace of the original layout left. With the new changes, I can no longer reproduce the above described problem.

I should say a little something about this. Obviously the message board underwent huge cosmetic changes. While doing that, I managed to get the row for each forum down to 2/3 the previous height, making the forum front page much more compact, allowing me to add a couple more without pushing others further down the page. Though the topic of this thread, and what's most immediately visible to people, are the cosmetic changes, the biggest changes to the rest of the site are actually on the back end. The front page is running on a whole new set of code that's much more sport-agnostic, dramatically increasing the possibility of promoting the basketballs to the same level as football on SiouxSports.com sports in coming years.

Since I was able to duplicate it before, but now can repeatedly get it to work after a change that I thought might make it work, I wonder if you're still sitting on a cached version. Try holding down the shift key while hitting the reload/refresh button and see if you get the same result.

Don't mind public comments at all. Not aimed specifically at you, it's somewhat fascinating to me what different people see in the logo. For example, no amount of staring turns the hair/feathers into flowers for me, and I don't get the femininity/soft vibe either (though I wouldn't be at all opposed to ambiguity, as there certainly are female Sioux athletes). In fact, I've felt like it looked like a crisp, strong warrior, but that a weakness was indeterminate origin (Greek, Mayan as opposed to Indian?) For something completely different, Mrs. SiouxSports.com can't get over what she sees as crazy green earrings. I guess that's the charm of an abstract image.

That's a stock ad that drops in when I'm too lazy to authorize sufficient others or when you've viewed so many pages today (thanks!) that it doesn't have new ads to show you because you've seen them all already.

I've struggled with that for years. The actual kelly green is a horrible color to design a web site around, to the point that guys like this eschew it almost entirely, while guys like this also use many other shades. This color has actually the exact same amount of green as the old one, but it appears a bit darker because it also has a little blue and red (whereas the old one was only green). The other thing I had a lot of trouble with in the design phase was how different it looked on each computer. Some lighter variants looked ridiculous on my high end LCDs but good on my laptop, whereas this appears a bit dark on my laptop, but pretty good on my LCD. Yes, only the front few pages and those mechanically generated (e.g. forum, blog, wiki) have the new style. Pages that are built from data (e.g. schedules and so forth) will be converted over soon, the rest very slowly.

siouxnami -- that's exactly the intent, for people to be able to come up with pages worth maintaining with some more structure and permanence than a message port post. The way to make a new page would be to edit the front page, add a new link to whatever the new page should be named, (following the syntax of the existing two) and then follow the link. Is that what you were trying, and if so, what part can't you do? ray77 -- IE7 display problem fixed. I'm starting to dislike IE7 more and more

Thanks. Will fix ASAP. I got that wrong because I messed up the home-away logic here. Will fix both ASAP.

No worries, I appreciate the feedback. As I've hinted at in some other threads, I definitely anticipate a fair amount of strong negative reaction. Now's as good a time as any for some background and explanation. I had the artist initially make half a dozen variations, some of which I guided to be text-based like a lot of the community's ideas and some of which I left him to design at his discretion. When I showed the demos to people, emotions fell in a much narrower band on the text-based logos (e.g. SiouxSports.com with a tomahawk in place of the T). That is, no one hated them and no one thought any was much better than just o.k. When moving to symbolic logos, a couple of which were Indian-head variations, the reactions were much more wild. Some loved, some hated each one. I must admit to favoring decoration that draws wider emotional reaction. However, the final decision to go with a symbol came down to a desire to emphasize the tie to the Sioux, rather than to try to emphasize the brand SiouxSports.com. A logo featuring SiouxSports.com conveys being a fan of a web site; a symbol-based logo can convey being a fan of the Sioux. As to choosing this particular symbol-based logo, it certainly wasn't a unanimous favorite, either. However, the abstract line art had a modern but simplistic symbolism that was generally liked. That said, you're not alone; it was hated by a few, and I certainly expect anything I find myself describing as abstract, line art, and modern to draw more than a few negative reactions. The best I can tell you for now is that it's definitely grown on me over the months.