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is there a better college hockey forum than USCHO?

Re: is there a better college hockey forum than USCHO?

Caustic Undertow said:
That quote is a good reminder of the challenges that come from covering college hockey. As much as people on this site bellyache about television coverage, columnists, and websites, the truth is that we are fortunate to have what we do. There just isn't a lot of money in covering college hockey. Networks don't make a huge profit, commentators don't make a solid living, and websites simply don't have a lot of spare cash. There's a lot of biting-the-hand-that-feeds-you going on in fan forums.

Once upon a time fans lodging their annual complaint about ESPN's coverage of the Frozen Four expressed their wish that Gary Thorne, a guy who "knows college hockey," would get the call. Now Thorne has the coverage, and they still hate it. People complained about Mazzocco and Woog's Fox North commentary and homerism for the Gophers; now they're gone, and people lament their departure.

People complain about this site, and it's not perfect. But if it closes up shop, we'll whine for the "good ol' days" back when we had a unified national hockey forum.

I first logged on here in 2001. This site has been a fabulous resource to me as a college hockey fan, and my ability to enjoy the sport has been considerably aided by its work. Now I do use CHN and some blogs to get a lot of my information, and I do wish that scores were obtained quicker, but I am thankful this site exists and that it does what it can. I hope they can improve. Really, if you are unhappy with the technical performance, the logical solution is to donate money to improve the situation.
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I second this.
Are there things that could be better? Of course. But I am quite thankful to have USCHO, especially knowing that those who run it do so for love of the game and not as a career.
 
Re: is there a better college hockey forum than USCHO?

solovsfett said:
I would gladly donate $50 per year to the cause.

I honestly don't recall this site having as many problems as it has this season.

on friday and saturday nights it's 50/50 at best for getting to read and post
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This is the worst I can remember. In the past when it happened it was usually during the national tourney.
 
Re: is there a better college hockey forum than USCHO?

bothman said:
Well said! As non-paying customers and no underlying promised service level guarantees, we don't have much ground to stand on.
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Who's a non paying customer?, not me I support this site and expect to get on when I want to get on. Maybe you should cough up some dough?
 
Re: is there a better college hockey forum than USCHO?

walrus said:
Who's a non paying customer?, not me I support this site and expect to get on when I want to get on. Maybe you should cough up some dough?
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I pay as well, but that gives me access to more content, not better service.
 
Re: is there a better college hockey forum than USCHO?

If there was another website, wouldn't it stand to reason that we would be going there?

<---- Another paying customer, by the way.
 
Re: is there a better college hockey forum than USCHO?

I hope there is never another option and that this site upgrades to handle the extra weight of new users.

This is by far my favorite forum and while not as active a poster as many, I would really miss this site if it didn't exist anymore. I cannot say that about any other forum that I visit.

That said, the inability to get on after 9 pm on game nights is getting pretty frustrating. :mad:
 
Re: is there a better college hockey forum than USCHO?

I am a paying customer and I think they do a great job. To compare USCHO to other sites like ESPN is insane - keep in mind that this is a very niche sport. Frankly, I am surprised college hockey is big enough to support three major websites. I also understand their limitations since I run fantasycollegehockey.com, which in its biggest year received $10 in donations. I certainly don't do it for the money and I know they don't either.

How many of you who are complaining also use AdBlock Plus?
 
Re: is there a better college hockey forum than USCHO?

Gurtholfin said:
I hope there is never another option and that this site upgrades to handle the extra weight of new users.

This is by far my favorite forum and while not as active a poster as many, I would really miss this site if it didn't exist anymore. I cannot say that about any other forum that I visit.

That said, the inability to get on after 9 pm on game nights is getting pretty frustrating. :mad:
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I agree with this. I greatly treasure the friendships that I have made over the years due mainly to this site.
 
Re: is there a better college hockey forum than USCHO?

Hammer said:
I agree with this. I greatly treasure the friendships that I have made over the years due mainly to this site.
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I am now a PAID member.
 
Re: is there a better college hockey forum than USCHO?

It saddens me to see everyone complaining. I volunteer to run the professional regional group for my state. Reading that reminds me of all the people who whine to me that I don't enough and all the things I could do better. I know these guys do their best with little staff or $. I for one am very appreciative. From what interaction I have had with them it isn't like they don't care there are problems. We know they are trying to fix them. Maybe if more folks anted up and the budget was a bit bigger then things would be fixed a bit faster.
<---paying member too
 
Re: is there a better college hockey forum than USCHO?

leswp1 said:
Me too.
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Me three. And while most of my USCHO friendships are of the virtual variety, it's become my favorite watering hole on the internets! ;)

Sure, things could be better, but the ice isn't always smoother in the other rinks either. I'm sure the problems are known and are being/will be worked on to make (and keep) this the best college hockey site around!
 
Re: is there a better college hockey forum than USCHO?

Part of the fun is the black art of tuning the configuration of the Apache web server. We had been running it following recommended settings, such as they are, as experts have conflicting opinions. We made an educated guess today and tweaked a couple of parameters which made a huge difference tonight. We knew that there should not have been as much of a performance penalty with the change in platform for 2010 and it was a case of altering settings to fit changed conditions.

That said, we are indeed upgrading the web server to some new hardware and making use of the old to supplement it.

As far as ads, from what we can see in our advertising stats, Ad Blocker is probably causing us a 10-15 percent hit on revenue. Google AdSense lets you look at the percentage of ads served. That's not to say that 15 percent of users are using Ad Blocker, but that power users are.

A few other things we're going to roll out (or fix) have been delayed while dealing with this issue, so we've got some good stuff coming soon.
 
Re: is there a better college hockey forum than USCHO?

Oh, and thanks for being patient. There isn't a whole lot of money in college hockey and we're doing what we can with what we have.

One other thing ... a large portion of the problems early this season have been with third-party software, causing us to have to fix, rewrite or replace a bunch of code. None of those issues revealed themselves until we were under the load of being in production. We really don't have the resources to do as much load testing as we'd like. It's also hard to gauge the impact of certain games, or when certain teams are on the road and programs with huge fan bases are online when they might not be otherwise. We also have times with huge spikes in traffic. Late Friday and late Saturday are two of them, but the third highest is lunch time on Mondays.

So ... be assured we're not ignoring issues. We're doing what we can with what we've got until we can do more.
 
Re: is there a better college hockey forum than USCHO?

Ed Trefzger said:
As far as ads, from what we can see in our advertising stats, Ad Blocker is probably causing us a 10-15 percent hit on revenue. Google AdSense lets you look at the percentage of ads served. That's not to say that 15 percent of users are using Ad Blocker, but that power users are.
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How much of a hit (percentage) do you take from Extra users opting out of ads, or is that what you meant? I'll keep ads if that is a part of the problem.
 
Re: is there a better college hockey forum than USCHO?

Ed Trefzger said:
Oh, and thanks for being patient. There isn't a whole lot of money in college hockey and we're doing what we can with what we have.

One other thing ... a large portion of the problems early this season have been with third-party software, causing us to have to fix, rewrite or replace a bunch of code. None of those issues revealed themselves until we were under the load of being in production. We really don't have the resources to do as much load testing as we'd like. It's also hard to gauge the impact of certain games, or when certain teams are on the road and programs with huge fan bases are online when they might not be otherwise. We also have times with huge spikes in traffic. Late Friday and late Saturday are two of them, but the third highest is lunch time on Mondays.

So ... be assured we're not ignoring issues. We're doing what we can with what we've got until we can do more.
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Thankls for coming on and setting everyone straight.
 
Re: is there a better college hockey forum than USCHO?

Ed Trefzger said:
Oh, and thanks for being patient. There isn't a whole lot of money in college hockey and we're doing what we can with what we have.

One other thing ... a large portion of the problems early this season have been with third-party software, causing us to have to fix, rewrite or replace a bunch of code. None of those issues revealed themselves until we were under the load of being in production. We really don't have the resources to do as much load testing as we'd like. It's also hard to gauge the impact of certain games, or when certain teams are on the road and programs with huge fan bases are online when they might not be otherwise. We also have times with huge spikes in traffic. Late Friday and late Saturday are two of them, but the third highest is lunch time on Mondays.

So ... be assured we're not ignoring issues. We're doing what we can with what we've got until we can do more.
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thank you for your thorough explanation
 
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