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, I took on a mission to collect and save as many of the medallion hunt posts to the cooler as i could in that time. The 2000-2001 and 2002 hunt threads are presented as they originally appeared. Earlier hunt threads are what has been pieced together by others. In time, these archives will be parsed out and incorporated into the overall historical archive. Until then, what we have is what we have.
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, I put together a script to archive as much of our content as possible. The content from PF has been extracted from several hundred megabytes of xml files that were generated from the contents of the PF HTML output. As the data is processed, the PF archive will be populated with the actual posts and author information from the original site.
Now that we're at ableminds, we feel a little more secure in our discussion board host. After all, everyone who participates pays for the access. However, that won't prevent a running discussion archive from there as well. The script to do it is a work in progress, and priority is given, of course, to getting the PF archive up in one "piece".
In the meantime, sit back, and reminisce about treasure hunts of days gone by.
During the 1990’s, the St Paul Pioneer Press opened online discussion forums. These forums were called Water Coolers. The forums had discussion topics related to sports, politics, news, and current events. Each year, the Pioneer Planet – the online section of the Pioneer Press – opened a discussion forum as a media for hunters to discuss the clues for the Winter Carnival Medallion Hunt.
During the earlier years, one might find a few hundred posts during the hunt. As more hunters had computers, those numbers jumped. From 1997 to 1998, the number of posts increased from the hundreds to the 5-digit thousands. It was during the 1998 hunt the Cooler Crew was born.
The community spirit and teamwork displayed in the Pioneer Press Medallion Hunt thread was inspiring. The group of hunters found themselves at the end of a hunt not wanting to let go of new friendships and the camaraderie found on the Water Cooler board. The idea emerged to do what anyone would do in the middle of winter in Minnesota. A picnic in Cherokee was planned - the first Rehash Bash!
