USCHO going to pay structure?

[French Rage]

The premium USCHO gives you access to the college hockey video game!

[Trotsky]

I never doubted for a moment that the web would sooner rather than later be dominated by the user fee model.  What we should insist upon, however, is a fee structure which allows the user freedom from *all* advertising at some level of price.

[Jacob 03]

For me the move to a user fee structure for the bulk of ESPN's online content did little more than help me realize how overvalued it was.  One can find lots of things on the internet worth 10,20, or even 40 dollars a year; shoddy sportswriting isn't one of them.  The various non-hack writers for USCHO might have been worth a subscription fee of some kind, but not when a few of them are now providing free content elsewhere.  

I still wouldn't mind if USCHO showed up on, say, LexisNexis though....

[JimHyla]

[Q]CowbellGuy Wrote:

 The bottom line is that revenue generated from ads is a joke.[/q]Tell that to Google.:-D

[JDeafv]

I'd put up the money on USCHO if they could find a way to link the polls the same way they link everything else on the site.

Why can't I click directly on a school-name in the polls and get to their homepage?  

I've asked several times in the submit a comment, Wodon says it's the most commonly requested upgrade, but that it "just can't be done."  

I don't get it.  Perhaps I'm not web-savy enough.

[Beeeej]

Just a wild guess - but the polls are formatted as "preformatted text," so that they appear in single-pitch font.  Any other format, and the columns (i.e., "record," "Pts") wouldn't line up.  My wild guess it that you can't use any text that's preformatted as a link.

Beeeej

[CowbellGuy]

Nah, he's full of it.

http://www.brc.cornell.edu/age/prehref.html

[JDeafv]

Good point Beeej - strike that following Age's post.
 

I guess I'm spoiled by the magic that can make the "standings" on USCHO have aligned columns and links to the team homepages from the school names!   ::rolleyes::

[Beeeej]

That's why I called it a "wild guess."  I haven't been ahead of the curve - or anywhere near the curve, for that matter - on HTML coding since about 1998.

Beeeej

[KeithK]

I think "just can't be done" means that they can't be bothered to spend any time on it.  I can't imagine it would take more than a short amount of time for someone to write a Perl script to inset the appropriate links and retain formatting, even assuming that their exisitng script couldn't be used.   Heck they could even put the poll results in a table instead of using preformatted...

[CowbellGuy]

Tables are sooo 2000.

For that matter, PRE is so 1993.

[JDeafv]

So why would they be using such an outdated format?  

Perhaps they can hire SalsaShark.net to fix it.  :-P

[KeithK]

[Q]CowbellGuy Wrote:

 Tables are sooo 2000.

For that matter, PRE is so 1993.[/q]Sorry.  You might recall I haven't had a web site since around 2000... (most of the links are broken on my elynah server archives too).

[jtwcornell91]

[Q]CowbellGuy Wrote:

 Tables are sooo 2000.[/q]

If you mean they've been replaced by CSS, that's true for tables (ab)used for formatting.  But tables like standings are actually logically tables.

[adamw]

For the record, I never said that links from the polls page couldn't be done -- just that it would require an overhaul to how the polls were displayed.  The poll page was not database driven - unlike most everything else there.  That would have required time and energy better spent elsewhere.

In any event, I'm not there anymore ... I'll refrain from any specific comments on the topic that started this ... but generally speaking, I believe it's a very tough issue ... and each web site operator, and each person, must make their own decision as to what's worth it and what isn't ... and then let the chips fall where they may.  CHN will have its own set of content and bells and whistles, free, and people must decide for themselves which content provider is worth it.  The good thing is, the it doesn't have to be either/or.  There is more and more college hockey content out there all the time, and that's a good thing.  Hopefully, each provider has things make it stand out from the other, and everyone wins.  If you poke around CHN, hopefully you'll find little things that make it stand out.  And things are just getting started, so hopefully there will be more and more.