The next high school hockey season, 2012-13, will be the twelfth for Wisconsin Prep Hockey, even though we were known as The Wisconsin Hockey Network for most of the first season. Much has changed over the seasons, and the site has been through two total makeovers. Many new features have been added, and some have gone away. This month marks the end of another of the old traditions, the WiPH Forums.

The Forums were a big part of the site early on. In fact, our first iteration of WiPH was merely a content management system called post-nuke, with some news articles, a photo gallery, and the Forums. Most of the fun was in the forums. Back in those early days the forums were wide open. Anybody could create an account and post their opinions. We had a few simple rules which most of the users followed. But we also had some knuckleheads. Lots and lots of  knuckleheads

Our intentions were good; we wanted the site to be a community of high school hockey players, fans, and coaches. So we welcomed input from all members of the community. We soon found out that not all members could handle the responsibility.

The most infamous early offender was the Stoughton Squid Kid. Our first response would be to delete the offending post, and notify the user that they were breaking the rules, so please read them again and comply with any future posts. Didn’t work with this dude. He specialized in being obnoxious. About the time we decided to ban him from the forums, he was also getting tossed out of hockey rinks. But our system was too simple. All he had to do was go get a new hotmail account and sign up again as a different user.

This was back in the day when my office was in my home, so I was at my computer pretty much all day. I checked the forums regularly. The offending posts didn’t stay up on the boards for very long. And even under a different name, we could still recognize the Squid Kid. Eventually, he caught on that he was just wasting his time and ours, since hardly anybody had a chance to see his posts, so he settled down.

Back then I would average about 4 hours a day just moderating and pruning the forums, all while trying to do my regular work. It’s a good thing I had an understanding boss.

The following season the action turned to Eau Claire. North and Memorial each had good teams, and bad blood. And they went after each other in the forums. Banning users wasn’t working, as there were too many on either side that just kept coming up with new accounts. So I took to banning IP addresses, and then ranges of IP addresses. At one time we had both of the high schools and one of the ISP’s in that area completely blocked from the forums. I finally got to sleep a little bit for a week or so.

The flowing season introduced the Wisconsin Prep Hockey community to Trasher’s buddy Primetime, an interesting character.

Eventually I got involved with another business and I no longer had four hours of free time every day to moderate the forums. We looked for additional volunteers, but got no takers. So the decision was made to charge a five dollar fee for the right to post in the forums. It wasn’t meant to make us money, but to make it easier to police the posts. By charging a nominal fee, the users had to actually identify themselves. So if we banned one, we would know if he tried to come back as a new user.

It served its purpose of cutting a lot of the crap out of the forums, but it also cut out a lot of the fun as well. We still managed to go for a few years having some intelligent conversations and debates in the forums, but lately they have really slowed down. Since moving to the NGIN platform, the forums have been stagnant. As I write this, it has been over a month since anything was posted. I know this is the off-season, but it wasn’t much more during the season.

Readers have other ways of contributing to the site now, and we still do encourage our readers to contribute. We now make comment streams available for most if not all of our articles and game summaries. Usually we only require that you have an account and are logged in to post a comment. Registering an account is free and easy, so there is really no excuse to not have an account. We won’t spam you or sell the information. In fact, we rarely even look at the users lists.

We are enhancing our feature game coverage to include more reader interaction during the games using social media and cell phone apps. So fret not for the forums, they served their purpose once upon a time, but we are moving on the greater things. We hope you will stick with us.