Reflections on the 2017 Hunt

As February begins, and the 2017 Winter Carnival and Treasure Hunt are behind us, I think it an appropriate time to reflect on the past hunt, the fact that the Cooler Crew has been around for 20 years now (in person versus just online), and what's in store for the future.

The 2017 Hunt

Wow. Just wow. After back to back years outside of the city, there was a lot of speculation that the medallion would have to be back in St. Paul this year. The masses on the Pioneer Press boards were visibly agitated after Snail Lake was followed up by Bald Eagle/Otter Lake, which came on the heels of Tony Schmidt only 3 years earlier, since it is after all the St. Paul Winter Carnival, not the Ramsey County Winter Carnival. If 2015-2016 were unprecendented, 2017 was one for the books. Ma Press hid the puck in Keller Park, leaving the city for three consecutive years, and when including Tony Schmidt, leaving it four out of the last six years. As of this moment, a full half of the hunts in the 2010's have been outside of the city.

When you think about it though, it is rather necessary. With thousands of people searching the clues would have to be spectacularly (and disappointingly) vague in order to have a longer hunt in a smaller park, since we all know far too much about the parks in St. Paul. We'd have nine clues of obscure references around the park, one clue of street names, one clue saying this is the park, and finally the x marks the spot. That's not the makings of a fun hunt. At the same time, we know way too much about the "prime" hunt parks (Highland, Como, Hidden Falls, Crosby, Cherokee, Phalen, Indian Mounds, and Battle Creek) to have an effective hunt in one of them either. And if one of them were used, hunters would be complaining about how Como is overused. Yes, Highland is overdue, but so are Phalen, Crosby, and Beaver Lake for that matter.

Beaver Lake could actually make for an interesting hunt, although its size is mostly the lake. The medalliion was last there in 1964, when it was known as Lincoln Park. We've had a Mock Hunt there too. At the same time, its not one of the top contenders for a hunt. Why? I know not. Perhaps it should be. Perhaps one of us should plan another Mock Hunt there. We'll have to see.

What's that leave? The suburbs. To the naysayers, I say "get used to it". No one has gone around and landmarked and geocoded every single thing in the larger suburban parks. And there are a lot of them, making up a lot of space. The parks are ripe for the picking to use. Its going to be very interesting indeed to see if, after another two years, the title for the 2010s page on this site changes to "When the suburbs became the stage" to go along with "When the city was the stage" from the '60s.

20 Years of the Cooler Crew

Well, yes and no. We had our 20th annual Rehash Bash this year, and I think everyone agrees that having the thing indoors is far superior to having it in a frigid park. We all remember how bone chilling Phalen's rehash was in 2004. having the 20th annual of anything means 19 years from end to end. Really the number to use is the number of Pre-Digs we've had, since the first one of those didn't happen until 1999. But the thing to remember is that's how long its been that the first Coolerheads cautiously braved the cold for a winter potluck picnic where no one knew anyone else, save for the online relationships that had been forged.

With an attendance of about 60, it was nice to see that we're still bringing in newbies, both before and after the hunt. We welcomed 5 adult newbies and a few kids to the group this year at the Rehash, with our famous rubber chicken initiation ceremony. No one around really knows what the bottle of rubbing alcohol or white towel are really supposed to be for, but it sure is fun to watch the look on people's faces when we tell them they need to provide them. It must be the humor factor that it provides, since none of the intitiates actually brought their own.

Aside from myself, keeping this website running and growing and enhancing it, there are so many people within the group who need some credit for keeping things running smoothly. Shout outs go to Clue Master for setting up the pre-dig at Josephs for the last several years, to him and Barefootguy for handling the Park Pick Pool. Thanks to Allison Wonderland for organizing the room rental for the Rehash Bash for umpteen years, and to everyone who chips in for the room rental fees. Thanks go to Mystical Muzik, AW, Red Bear, Cluey, KT, and everyone who now and in the past has run the show at the Rehash Bash every year. To everyone who has contributed door prizes through the years, thank you!!! And thank you to everyone who has in the past done anything to make the group and this web site viable over the last 20 years. That includes everyone who finds new city hunts throughout the year and sends them to me to include here. There really are too many of you to name

That said, next year will be the 20th anniversary of the Rehash Bash. You gotta admit, that's pretty impressive. I can't wait to see everyone!

The Future

Something I've noticed over the last few years is folks lamenting "the good old days" of the  Ableminds / Peoples Forum / Water Cooler discussion boards. After the Water Cooler shut down in 2002, there weren't a whole lot of Coolerheads who cared for the more "modern" forums that were explictly threaded with boatloads of topics, as opposed to individual posts with up to thousands of comments. Its understandable then that the lamenting is becoming more and more pronounced; the Facebook groups are a lot more like those threaded forums with boatloads of topics.

I've had my eyes on developing some sort of Ableminds-esque forum to incorporate directly into this site (and to incorporate the entire discussion board archive into it). And I still plan to do something along those lines; the general layout has been in my mind for quite some time now. The reason I haven't done anything with the idea is that a couple of years ago the software that runs the web site got a major core upgrade. I've written a lot of code to handle various aspects of the core site. Out of the box, Drupal has no knowledge of Treasure Hunts. Being our bread and butter that's kind of important. Unfortunately, its not a simple drop-in to move the code from the old version to the new, it has to be re-written. As such I've faced a dilemma. Do I write the code for a forum, only to have to rewrite it before I can migrate the site to the new version of the software? Or does it make more sense to migrate the site and write forum code only once? It seems that the latter is the far preferable option, so that's what I plan to do.

So what have I done to customize the site?

• The logo up in the top of the page you may have noticed changes on holidays. Big G created the logo that's there normally, and East Side Digger did the holiday ones. I wrote the code that allows the logo to change. 
• When you go to a treasure hunt page, particularly ones for the Pioneer Press hunts, you may notice that there are links to other pages within the site containing newspaper articles relevant to that hunt. Without going into too many technical details, I wrote a separate module to create that.
• The calendar. While it wasn't really a huge amount of code, this does consist of enough to create a Calendar Event content type, and a view to show the calendar. 
• The code to handle treasure hunt pages. This is where a lot of the meat of the custom code is.
• Finally, the overall look of the site.

In order to make a migration, I'm thinking that the Related Content module, the Calendar Event module, and the Treasure Hunt module (and the associated sub-modules) are absolutely necessary to migrate the site over. If the logo is static for a while, and if we can't necessarily have a calendar on day one, even though the events are there, I can live with that (though I'd prefer to have the calendar very quickly if we don't). Of these, the code for related content is complete. I've made some headway on the Treasure Hunt code, and hope to have it finished up before the Summer of this year. Hope is a big word since I've got a lot of projects on the house to work on between now and then too. But hey, we'll try. And to be perfectly honest, I'd like to be in a position to have the code up to snuff for all of it before Summer. If that ends up being the case, I can work to migrate the site to the new version of the software in the downtime between the end of the Summer hunting season and the 2018 medallion hunt.

Speaking of the summer hunting season, one of the things I decided to do last summer was to restrict access to the clues for active hunts on this site until afte the hunt is completed. If you have an account and are logged in, you get to override this restriction.It may sound like we're being rude, but being a hunter myself, the clues on this site are more for the convenience of this group of hunters than anyone else. With the exception of a very small handful of hunts, the clues can be found on Facebook or some other web page by anyone else. After discussion with several hard core summer hunters, this just seemed like the right thing to do. If you need an account, feel free to hit up the contact link at the bottom of the page. I'll need an email address and a name you wish to be known as (we all have a history here of using pseudonyms, though you're free to use your real name if you so choose). For the moment, we don't allow access to the account creation page in order to avoid spammers on the site. With an account, you can also click on the stars underneath clues and give your opinion on them, and even create blog entries like this one, and comment on posts that allow comments on them.

After I get things ready for migration, I do intend to dive in to creating the Cooler Crew forum. While it would be really nice to have it in place for the 2018 hunt, I don't think that's a realistic possibility. This is one of those things I want to have a good amount of testing on before we go through wiht it. But, for the 2019 hunt it could definitely happen. And that's where you'll need a site account to participate. Because no good web site that requests a password does so without using encryption, at that point I'll consider taking donations to pay for the SSL certificate annually. If there are enough donations, we can contemplate moving the site into the cloud rather than having it hosted in my basement. We have one now and you can use https instead of http if you'd like, but you'll have to accept the security warning to do so, because its a freebie certificate that's not from a mainstream certificate issuer.

Joining the Group and Coming to Events

Many of us have known each other for the better part of the 20 years the Cooler's been around, and as such there are some incredibly tight friendships that have formed. That said, we're open to anyone. If you're on Facebook, join the groups. Join in the fun too. We have plenty of get-togethers throughout the year that anyone can come to. Obviously there's the pre-dig gig and the rehash bash wrapping around the Pioneer Press hunt, and during that, you can be sure you'll meet at least a few of us wherever the Pioneer Press decides to distribute early editions of the newspapers each year. Just show up and ask "you dig?". You'll find us. We also have get-togethers during the year for our Mock Hunts. There's usually 3 or 4 of them each year, and they're posted here along with the kickoff events. They're open to anyone so feel free to show up; no invitation is needed.

I think that about wraps up my immediate thoughts on the past, present, and future of the crew. Until next time, I shall return to obscurity on the site by posting as Joe Medallion.