The Cooler Crew Discussion Board Archives
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It's where we first met, it explains our name, and it serves as a wonderful place to converse about the cooler things that are on our minds. Although the Pioneer Press closed the original Water Cooler message Boards during a site re-vamp after the 2002 hunt, the Cooler Crew lives on.
The original Water Cooler, as we knew it, ceased to exist on Thursday, February 7, 2002 at 7:14 pm. Most Coolerheads had anticipated this change, as Knight-Ridder had been doing it with its other newspaper properties, as well. As a result of this anticipation, we took on a mission to collect and save as many of the medallion hunt posts to the cooler as we could in that time. The 2002 hunt threads is presented as it originally appeared. The 2000 and 2001 hunt threads were originally a single thread, but we split them apart for presentation here. The 1998 and 1999 threads were pieced together by others and formatted to match what they would have originally looked like as close as we can make it work. Unless so censored in the sources (Peoplesforum and older), no effort has been made to sanitize what you see here. When we had heated knock-down, drag out, on the verge of fists flying arguments, they're preserved. Also, it should be noted that the only data archived from PF and Ableminds is that which the guy running the scripts (most of the time, that would be ares) had permission to access, whether Host or read-only access.
Once the Water Cooler change happened, there was a mad scramble to find a suitable replacement site that had the same format as our old Cooler. What we came up with was a site called The Peoples Forum, which had been accepting refugees from several other Web Crossing based sites at the time. PF started having financial troubles of its own in 2005, and again, we were again facing the possibility of our discussion board shutting down. Again preparing for this, we scripted and archived all of our own content from PF. The attachments, while preserved, aren't yet attached to the posts, but in time, will be.
At ableminds, we felt a lot more secure in our discussion board host. After all, everyone who participates pays for the access. However, that didn't prevent a running discussion archive from there as well. Unfortunately, in late 2017 and early 2018, Ableminds was running into capacity problems, and by the time we realized it to get an archive snapshot here, they'd disabled all of the attachments, so we couldn't grab all the various pictures that were attached to posts.If it ever becomes available, we'll grab it as soon as we can.
After the 2018 hunt, Ableminds experienced a critical site failure and their entire database was corrupted. I never grabbed a final snapshot of the 300-400 posts that happened in the 2018 Hunt thread that was created for the handful of us that still paid to post there. Those posts are likely forever lost. As a result of the Ableminds database lost, I quick threw something together as a forum to play around with within the cooler crew site. It's not a perfect replication of the Web Crossing software, but for our purposes can be made to function close enough to it to be a reasonable approximation.
In the meantime, sit back, and reminisce about treasure hunts of days gone by.
- 1998-2002 Pioneer Press Water Cooler Archive This portion of the archives, which only contained Winter Carnival Medallion Hunt discussions, has been migrated into the site forum.
- 2002-2005 Peoplesforum.com Cooler Crew Archive
- 2005-2018 Ableminds Cooler Crew Archive
