Fans Sound Off: Carolina Hurricanes Message Boards and Blogs (final revision)

New Assignment: Revise your online writing presentation based on feedback from the instructor and post to your blog. Solicit feedback also from your writing workshop partner(s) from modules 1 & 2. I’ve received comments from the instructor and writing partner, as well as from one of the bloggers I catalogued, and have incorporated all the comments. I’ve also updated the stats and information, as well as linked the board logos.

Original assignment: Original writing piece for an organization, the Carolina Hurricanes NHL hockey team (with which I have no affiliation). Site visitors may be those who regularly frequent message boards and are familiar with the written and unwritten rules, or they may be new to the genre and will welcome a FAQ on etiquette. Users might just come once or twice to the site, or may revisit to see updated resources and news about the fan message board universe.

You may be in the capacity crowd when 18,730 fans converge on the RBC Center for home dates for the 2006 NHL Stanley Cup champion Carolina Hurricanes, a fan from afar, a former Raleigh area resident, or even a resident of another country, perhaps the native land of one of the Canes’ European-born players. With the internet, the fun doesn’t have to end when the game is over. This guide to online fan sites, such as message boards and blogs, can keep you involved.

MESSAGE BOARDS

Hundreds of Canes fans are using online message boards to share their experiences, commenting on the team and individual players. Tickets are traded, photos posted and shared, and stories told and retold. Here’s how to get in on the action.

Anyone with an internet connection can join the online Carolina Hurricanes world. Message board users can make up their own screen names and stay relatively anonymous, or post with their real names, and even upload avatars like that of Scoreboards message board moderator Jeffbear.

BLOGS

In addition to message boards, blogs allow individual fans to set up their own individualized weblogs and post commentary, with most allowing readers of the blog to chime in with their comments. A good blog will also have a blogroll, linking the reader to similar sites or resources.

AN ONLINE FAN COMMUNITY

Online fan communities have largely developed on their own, but both national media and the team itself have also hosted message boards or set up blogs. This article catalogues numerous message boards and blogs that focus on the Canes, as well as gives casual fans pointers on using those boards. Message boards are be of two varieties, moderated, and those with standards. Scoreboards moderator Jeffbear discusses differences:

“I think it’s important to deal with the stance regarding moderation and Standards up front. There’s a huge difference between an actively moderated board and a loosely moderated board in terms of what posters can get away with in terms of behavior, and it’s good to make people aware of the rules up front … and then enforce them. All message boards generate their own conventions in terms of slang terms, user handles, avatar pictures and the like. Those things need to be explained in a good FAQ”

GAME DAY THREAD
Fans seem to enjoy the message board game-day thread, where the moderator posts an introduction to the game a day or two in advance, fans make predictions and talk about injuries, and during the game fans listening on the radio or watching on TV post commentary. Fans returning from the game also chime in later. A regular season game might see 100+ postings, while a playoff game might have over 300.

CANES MESSAGE BOARD CATALOGUE

To get you started, here’s an extensive list of Carolina Hurricanes oriented message boards:

• The Scoreboards is a message board covering hockey, baseball, football, and basketball, with individual boards for each team. There are 1,769 members of the board with privileges to post anywhere. A smaller number of those post on the Canes board. The greatest activity on this board is for NHL hockey, with 3,911 separate discussion threads, compared with 969 for baseball and 609 for NFL football. The Scoreboards Canes board is the newest Canes message board, becoming active August 24, 2006, and already has 475 discussion threads. The systemwide moderator has posted community standards, covering harassment, disruption, vulgarity, solicitation, spamming, and use of copyrighted materials, while Canes Scoreboards moderator Jeffbear has posted a FAQ for the site, covering the history of the board, including the migration of participants from several other boards in the past, as well as inside jokes, and short bio sketches of some frequent posters. There is a general search function, and a member list and the ability to send private messages to members exists. The member list includes profiles and the ability to search posts by member. For those with greater interest in the Scoreboards, Jeffbear discusses the history of both Scoreboards and Canes message boards in general.

• Letsgocanes.com (LGC) is an independent board with 1,093 members, 7,142 threads, and over 383,000 individual posts. Members can send private messages to other members, and start new threads. Its Canes discussion thread includes the obligatory game day thread and even a place for new members to introduce themselves. On the top menu bar is a FAQ that is more focused on technical issues than the Scoreboards FAQ. LGC has separate sections for ticket exchanges, commentary on subjects such as other NHL teams, minor league hockey, and member initiated polls. There is a general search function, and a member list and the ability to send private messages to members exists. The member list includes profiles and the ability to search posts by member. LGC moderator Caniac suggests in a message about the development of that message board: “I would say it is beneficial if a new user lurks for a little bit to see how the site works and how they’re supposed to act and even type.”

• HFBoards.com (short for Hockey’s Future) is a site like Scoreboards but for NHL hockey only, with over 31,000 members systemwide. Its Canes message board does not have separate section for different aspect of hockey like LGC, but all threads shown in inverse order of last posting. This makes finding threads more difficult. Its FAQ is very similar to LGC’s. There is a general search function, and a member list and the ability to send private messages to members exists. The member list includes profiles and the ability to search posts by member.

• ESPN maintains message boards for every professional sport and team. Its Canes message board is lightly used, with 116 topics and 588 messages dating back only to October 1, 2006. Board managers have posted that all boards were reset on that date and older messages eliminated. No member list or contact capabilities exist, making this board less useful to posters. (ESPN has no message board specific logo)

• The Insiders (also known as scout or fanhome) maintains a Canes message board that is organized much like HFBoards. It was one of the most active Canes message boards until mid-summer 2006 when most posters deserted to Scoreboards after a dispute with management over long-term prospects of maintaining the boards.  Its structure is similar to that of HFBoards. Now there are only a few posts per week. 

• Fanhome.com re-established itself in late November after a split from scout.com. It has a new Canes message board established November 21, but as of December 3 there were two threads with 8 posts. 

• The Canes maintain an official message board, “Caniac Corner“. In existence several years, the board went down during the 2006 Stanley Cup finals, was replaced for a time by a link to an outside board, and was finally put back online October 31, 2006, but with all old messages purged. A Canes official told me in September that the board was taken down during the finals because it had too much traffic. The forum has already registered 570 users since its reinstatement, and has 15,908 posts.

• News & Observer Carolina Hurricanes forum. Very lightly used, no search function, does allow other posts by a user to be searched after clicking on a post by that user. No special graphics. No FAQ.

MESSAGE BOARD FEATURE COMPARISON

There are a number of common desirable features on message boards, which I show in a comparison table below the descriptions (the new Fanhome is not evaluated):

• the Game day thread (mentioned above).
• new member intros, to help make a new member at home.
• a FAQ and/or community standards section to let a new member learn board policies.
• “stickies”, a feature that let the moderator keep popular or important topics at the top of the board, rather than sinking to later pages and thus hard to find.

                                         Scoreboard      LGC     HFBoards    ESPN   Caniac  Insiders   N&O

Game Day Thread              Y                       Y          Y                N          Y          Y          Y

New Member Intro            N                       Y          N                N          N         N          N

FAQ or comm. standards   Y                       Y          Y                Y          Y         N           N

Stickies                              Y                       Y          Y                N          N        N            N

CANES FAN BLOGS CATALOGUE

While anyone can start a free blog, here’s a list of Canes fan blogs found from a Google search and from blogrolls:

• Sweet tea, Barbecue and Bodychecks “Rants about hockey (chiefly the Carolina Hurricanes) from an Adopted Southerner” by the AcidQueen. Posts made several times a week, good blogroll.
• Carolina Hurricanes blog Hokejowy A Canes blog maintained by a fan from Poland.
• Red and Black hockey. Self-styled rants and raves about the Canes. deleted
• Stormbringer’s Blog of Madness Daily posts from a Virginia based fan who is a Triangle expatriate.
• Penalty Killer. From Chris, an Apex fan who makes several posts a week. Extensive blogroll.
• Canes Country. By Bubba, an unidentified fan
• Canes blog central. These are “official” house blogs of the Carolina Hurricanes, which do not allow comments to be posted. Among those blogging are defenseman Mike Commodore, TV play-by-play analyst John Forslund, Youth and Amateur coordinator Paul Strand, and Canes Media Relations Director Mike Sundheim.
• Life and Times of a Caniac Self styled as “A sarcastic, hockey-loving teenager’s view on life and the Carolina Hurricanes.”
• Caniac’s blog. Defunct blog, active during the 2005-2006 season.
• Hockey puck_it Defunct blog, active during the 2005-2006 season.
• Hurricanes Hockey News Blog that was active during the 2005-2006 season, recently began posting 2006-2007 news. Links for “about” and “contact information” are dead, making it hard to know anything about the writer’s perspective!
• Canes All-Stars New blog, established to promote the candidacies of Canes nominees Rod Brind’Amour, Erik Cole, Eric Staal, and Cam Ward to the 2007 NHL All-Star game. Covers the on-line voting process, the seasons of the four Canes, and some write-in campaigns.