ares's blog

It's been quite a while since there was a major overhaul of the Cooler Crew Site. The time has come for one. The software we've been running on, Drupal 7, was originally planned to go end of life several years ago, before the Covid pandemic, in fact. Even before the pandemic struck, the maintainers had pushed that end of life date off into the future, but the pandemic hadthem continuing to push it forward. 

 Its immediate successor, Drupal 8, was first released on November 19, 2015. This upgrade represented a major architectural change to both the software and the upgrade process. Unlike the upgrade from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7, which was comparatively simple, upgrading from 7 to 8 was, rather than being an in-place upgrade, going to be a migration. Content on the site would end up broken into smaller and smaller pieces for storage, and each piece of code was expected to perform its own migration. Given that the "important" content on this site is the supply of treasure hunt information, and I wrote a lot of code to enable all of the treasure hunt pieces, writing these migrations was not a trivial task, and so, as the end of life date kept getting pushed off, I also continued to push off the migration process.

In June of 2021, was the pandemic was winding down, the Drupal organization announced that Drupal 8 was being deprecated (it went EOL on November 2, 2021). Its own successor, Drupal 9, had been released on June 3, 2020, and it represented a potentially breaking change to how site configuration was managed. Drupal 9 reached the end of its life cycle on November 1, 2023, having been maintained alongside of Drupal 10 since its release on November 15, 2022. And oh yeah, the Drupal organization announced that the end of life to the software we've been using will be a non-negotiable, non-extendable January 5, 2025. 

So now, we had a jump from across 3 versions of the underlying software. Fortunately, I had started to write the migration code late in the Drupal 9 release cycle, so only minor changes were needed to move it to the current version of the Drupal. After a few test runs earlier on, and a couple more since the wind-down of the Winter 2024 treasure hunting season, I got to thinking that the only thing I had left was to make the site under Drupal 10 look as close as I could to the way it looked under Drupal 7. Fortunately making cosmetic changes to a web site is much simpler than making data structure changes, so after getting it "good enough" I decided to pull the trigger and make the changes. 

The result is what you see here. As I write this there are 3,826 pages on this site, that consist of treasure hunts, blog posts, newspaper articles, forums, and various other pieces of information. The underlying data has migrated over successfully. I took advantage of the migration process to make the hundreds of photo slide shows from various newspaper articles properly functional. But doing that means that there's a lot of content that I need to touch in order to make them fit the mold. 3,826, of them to be exact. 

I also made changes to how the various treasure hunts are organized, internally anyway. These changes made pages for the approximately 200 different treasure hunt types obsolete. Part of this process of touching each of those pages involves unpublishing them, so that I can repurpose the nodes (Drupal-speak for a piece of content) within the site for other uses. I don't like having gaps in the database for the node sequence numbers. This page, in fact, is taking the place of the page that formerly listed the Allison Wonderland Mock Hunt page. That part involves some database changes on my part, just to keep things clean. 

I'm about 626 pages into the whole process, out of 3,826. I've got a bit to go. But its going rather quickly. Until its done, there are certain things that may not work as well as I'd like. The menu items may not work. Treasure Hunt lists may not populate, but if there's something you're specifically looking for, you can always hit the search button in the top right corner of the site to look for it. As the guy who brings in most of the content in the site, I have to say I rather enjoy the tools that are behind the scenes for editing pages. And going forward moving to a new version of Drupal should be a lot easier for me. Hopefully you won't even notice it. 

Hopefully I'll be done touching everything that needs to be touched before the Summer hunting season kicks off. I've got a few that I want to find this year, and all I want to do here is copy clues into the respective pages. 

Because now that Drupal 10 has been released and available for 15 or so months, I'm going to have to get ready for Drupal 11's planned release in early December.

I'll let you know with another post when I'm done messing with the content. It will be soon. Until then, I probably know about things that may be problematic for you, so there's no need right now anyway to let me know if you see a problem.

And always remember:

Coolerheads will prevail!

The Water Cooler has been operational here for a couple of months now, so I thought I'd give a quick update on it.

As of right now, a few changes have been made based on feedback of the folks who have used it. The big one that's still out there is the inability to delete comments. At this point, there's a tradeoff between how we want the forum to look versus deleting comments. If we want to maintain the look linearly, I have to lock down the ability to delete comments, because deleting a comment right now results in all of the replies also get deleted, which would majorly screw up comments in a linear fashion.

That all said, I'm working on migrating the forum posts from the forum archive section of the database into the main site management system. This consists of several steps:

First, the archive contained posts from nearly 6000 unique user id's. Some of these were simple where a poster had an account at all three of the archive sites. They were easy to consolidate. The same was true of users, particularly at ableminds and PF who had survived through database compactions and rework so that, at one point they had one id in the database, and at a later point they had another. What was more interesting was consolidating folks whose user names had changed over time as they forgot passwords and created new accounts. Sometimes it was obvious, sometimes it took looking at taglines. Finally all of these users had to be imported into the account database here. By the time I got to this point, we were down to some 3800 unique posters. Over half of those posters had made only one or two posts. The vast majority of those users got condolidated into a "No user information available" user, although a few, who we know to have come back to the group, made the cut.

As a result of this step, you may find that you have an account at this site that you can't access. If you do, hit me up via the contact form below and I'll adjust things to give you access. If you need an account, do the same thing.

Step two is to actually consolidate the posts into comments on the site here. Since its our "bread and butter", so to speak, I'm starting with the archive of the Pioneer Press Treasure Hunt threads. The 1998-2002 threads were quite easy. The PF Archive is taking a bit more work. Since the forum was a free-for-all, we had public and private threads, which I decided to consolidate into a single thread for archive purposes. As a result, what looked like a Joe originally may not look like it now. I'll work my way back through the other hunt threads, and then the more heated or more fun discussions. Its an iterative process, since I want to clean up the links within the various posts to previous posts (easy) and posts in other threads which is not so easy since it will require two passes through to link up posts with their new comment ID's. Once I get through one thread it should be a matter of figuring out which threads to consolidate and creating an individual forum topic.

We don't have an archive of file attachments from Ableminds, and because of the database loss there we probably never will, but we do have four years worth of them from PF, which I do intend to incorporate here after the discussions are imported.

With all the technical details aside, let me just say that I think we're finally home. Yes, we've said that before, but the forum here is within the site. As long as its up, the forum is up. For the moment, the only way to access the threads that have been imported will be to have an account and be logged in, but that's how you can see the clues for in-progress medallion hunts too, so its a bonus.

Have a look around, kick your feet up and stay a while. I know I am.

If you're still active on Ableminds, you know that for the past few weeks it hasn't been well. The latest update we have from them, as of Saturday is as follows:

The Ableminds Forum database is corrupt and we have been unable to find a way to recover it. We consulted a few other experts and there were a couple of suggestions offered, but unfortunately it doesn't seem possible to recover most of the information that was in the database.

We have a copy of the user database we created when we recently had the last crisis. It's not 100% up to date, but it provides a starting point to restore some user information. We will have to go through our paypal records and checks that were sent in to sort out any changes since then. The plan is to create a new empty database so folks can get back to posting again. Initially it will be free of charge for a period of time. We will offer refunds to anyone who asks. We will add in time for the payments we identify for those who stick around so that paid users will have posting privileges for the free period plus their paid period.

Unfortunately we have also lost information that was in the database regarding forums and privileges for co-hosts etc. All of that is gone so it will need to be recreated for those who want to keep on with the forum. There is some information in scripts that were not lost so some of the functionality of the site itself is preserved.

We researched options for a new server environment and we will be running on a new server soon that should avoid future problems.

What happened? Basically there was some issue on the old server that we don't fully understand, but it was filling up the disk on the server and corrupted the database. We had a backup at that time and were able to free up space at the time the first outage was reported, and so we started web crossing again, but within a few hours before a backup completed, the issue occurred again corrupting the only database we had on the server that wasn't corrupt. With a new server, we will be taking greater precautions to have as many backups as possible which will be possible with the larger disk drivers that newer servers now have.

First of all, rest assured that the Cooler Crew site is safe from this sort of problem. The "disc" that the database is on is less than one third full. If it ever filled more than that, I have plenty of disc space available to expand the data into. I have mechanisms in place to keep tabs on the available and used disc space so that I can take action if it gets too bad. I put "disc" in quotes above, because the site doesn't run on its own server. It runs as a virtual machine on top of redundant physical discs. If I ever had a problem I could pull a bad disc out and replace it, and no one would ever be the wiser (except me). 

From what it sounds like in this report, *all* of the backups that Ableminds had of their databases were on the same disc in the server as the main one, so that when discs filled up it was game over. I could be wrong. The Cooler Crew database and files are backed up nightly to a different server with completely different storage. If the discs the site were on should fail completely, we'd be able to "quickly" reimport the database on a new virtual machine and be up and running relatively quickly. I say relatively because it does take time to get a new virtual machine installed and configured.

As far as I know, the only backup that Ableminds has is what's available here in our archive. Fortunately, I ran my archive script relatively recently. Unfortunately "recently" means "before the 2018" Pioneer Press Hunt. As a result, the 350 or so posts that were made in the 2018 hunt thread are lost forever.

Several of you know that I've been toying around with the idea of a forum within the site for quite some time. I've been hesitant to go forward with it because I wanted to get things in place to nail the style that we had with the WebCrossing software at Ableminds, which if you've ever looked at other forum software doesn't quite match what's out there. When Ableminds first went down, I started putting a few modules together in the playground environment that I have set up. With the last update that Ableminds posted, I decided to make them live on the real Cooler Crew site, even if things weren't perfect.

And so, with that, I encourage you to check out the newly-reborn Water Cooler. It isn't perfect and there is still plenty of room for improvement, but it is there. In order to maintain some of the features of Ableminds, general users are restricted from creating new topics (what were discussions at Ableminds) or folders. If you want something, feel free to ask; there's a forum discussion thread just for that purpose. If there are features you want to see added, suggest it. This is something I won't take any criticism, good, or bad, as an affront to me. I cobbled together a bunch of stuff other people had done within the framework to get this together, so I'll blame them for any shortcomings.

One thing many of us have wanted at Ableminds was the ability to "like" a post, like you can on Facebook. Guess what? You got it here.

So how do you get into the Water Cooler? First you have to have an account set up on the site. Apart from me, 90 or so of you already do. I think all of them are related to old screen names. You may have forgotten your screen name or password. If you did, that's fine. Hit me up with a message on Facebook or through the contact link at the bottom of the page and I'll get you set up. If you don't have an account here and want one, contact me in one of those same ways and I'll set you up with an account. Gotta do this to keep spammers from posting on the site until there's a more reliable way to control access.

And please, once you're in, if you have problems, or a suggestion, or whatever, use the forum discussion board to say something!!

Happy hunting (and happy posting)!

You dig?

The hunt has been over for nearly two weeks now. Rob scored his third Winter Carnival Medalllion find just after the 12th clue came out.

I was destined to be a weekender this year. With schedule changes and project plans at work I just couldn't get the time off. So, settling for nightly meet-ups in the bar and Friday night, Saturday and Sunday afternoon digging was the plan.

As they always do, however, plans changed.

By the time Saturday rolled around everybody knew it was Harriet Island. Of course everybody knew it was there in 2003 as well, and this hunt was bringing up some really bad memories of that red herring. By the time the Nagasaki Road clue came out, we're sitting there trying to figure out how we could fit the Plato clue to Como, just in case, but fortunately that one was for naught. 

I'd said before the hunt that I'd gladly be out through the 11th clue, but would call it a hunt if we got to the 12th clue and watch from the comfort of my bed.

Again, plans changed.

Sunday night. Monday night. All of a sudden its Tuesday night, and we're out there until the clue comes out. We didn't get any closer to the puck. It was a night.

The only problem was, I was once again hooked. The adrenaline was pumping like crazy. I made a decision.

The last times I was really out when it went to clue 12, 2003 and 2004, I'd sat in line at the Pioneer Press waiting for the newspaper so I could call the clue out into the park. I was going to be at Harriet Island when the clue came out.

Observing.

The night the "who hears a who" clue came out in 2003, I remember the line of cars up Wabasha, across 6th and then 94, and up Lexington to get to Como. Observing that from the air would have been amazing. Observing the mad rush on clue 12 would have been just as amazing.

Or so I thought.

On Wednesday afternoon, I came home from work, grabbed a quick bite to eat and decided to take a nap.

Don't worry, I had the alarm set for 8:30 so that I could get to the park in time for the clue to come out and be strategically positioned with a decent parking place. Again, to observe. I'd never seen the 12th clue mad rush, let alone taken part in it.

Miraculously, I ended up with a spot in the west parking lot of Harriet Island. It was surprisingly dead. There were sporadic headlamps here and there, but the sound of locusts traditionally associated with the final night of the hunt wasn't there. People must have been taking a break before the mad rush. Ironically, I was unknowingly parked within 50 yards of the coveted puck that night.

Cluey and me2 were warming up in their van, parked next to mr mn mikey. Having spent the time hunting with me2, I made my way over. Kitch was patiently waiting at Shamrock's for the clue to let us know what it was. When the scrambled clue came out there were 6 of us in that van. Bundled up as much as we could get, a good word to describe it would be "tight".

The scrambled clue came out. This was it. I was gonna be part of the mad rush I'd said I wasn't going to take part in. We unscrambled it as best we could, grabbed our hunting tools and left the van for the stage. We looked for the only trees we could find in the east parking lot that were shaped like v's. We moved snow. We chopped ice. We moved more snow. We chopped more ice.

And then me2's sister met up with us and said she heard someone had found it. Sure enough Brassmonkey (and his impromptu crew of Cooler fame), turned it up under a huge snowbank at the far end of the other parking lot.

Less than 150 feet from the van.

It was over. People started to head home. 

I did it. I was there for the mad rush. Unintentionally at that.

We didn't find it that night, because we picked the wrong side of the coin, unscrambling one line of the clue. It happens.

What I did find, however, was a renewed fervor, a renewed infection for finding this thing. For the camaraderie of it. For the highs of being so close. And the lows.

Having it back in St. Paul after three years in greater Ramsey County helped that a lot. The trek from Apple Valley to Bald Eagle/Otter Lake at the north end of the county is a long one.

I've said for quite some time that I'd love to one day be a Vulcan, and one day I'm sure I will. One of the requirements however is that Vulcans must miss work for the duration of the carnival. Missing work? Yeah, generally no problem there. I was able to get time off last year to hunt, and honestly I think I spent more time out this year than i did in Keller.

Missing the hunt however? I don't quite think I'm ready to give that up. This year, this Harriet Island hunt (a hunt for which I think the Pioneer Press redeemed themselves after 2003), reassured me of that.

Sure, the 10 grand would be nice. If anyone ever found the thing and didn't know what to do with the winnings they could certainly give them to me.

But in the end for a lot of people, myself included, the goal is to outsmart the clue-writer. Sometimes the thing is found "too early" with dumb luck. This year though, the press got us, and they got us honestly. Nobody touched that pile of snow until 10:30 the night the scrambled 12th clue came out. Nobody. Why? The general consensus of the masses was that they'd be foolish to put it in a snow bank in a parking lot, even though they told us they did right under our noses in several clues!!!! They practically gave away the park in the first clue, and no one picked up on it.

There's always a few clues that aren't great. A few that when the meanings come out make you think "well that's a bit of a stretch". This hunt was no different, e.g., the 2-3-2 clue. But none of the clues brought out anything that wasn't directly related to the park (as opposed to a school a good distance away from Como). You could debate the Irvine/Walnut Street clue, but it makes sense, and you can see it from the park.

I heard more than one person this year say this was the most fun they've had on a hunt in a long time. I wholeheartedly agree.

Some people think we had a new clue writer this year (some people always say that though). If we didn't, I offer my congratulations. You've graduated to a new level. Keep up the good work. If we did get a newbie. Holy cow. I don't think you realize how big the shoes are that you need to fill. Because you made them that way! Also, keep up the good work (and don't let the compliments go to your head)!

This hunt really is infectious. It gets in your blood, screws with your mind. This year proved that for me.

And because of it, I'm definitely looking forward to next year.

Some general thoughts

I've always subscribed to the school of thought that you really need to get out there and scout things out. You're not likely to put a hoe or a shovel into snow on clue 1 or 2, but you at least need some bearings.

Treasure Chest and I were talking about it this year as we often do. She wondered why I wanted to go out looking early on because you don't really have an idea where to look. She's right. But there are some things that you can't see from Google Maps; you actually have to be there to see it. Walnut street from the glib ghoul this year is one of those things. The 2-3-2, while obscure, was another. 

This goes to something I've said for years. No one ever found the medallion while sitting on their sofa. Or in front of their computer. Or whatever. The only way to find it is to get out there and look.

20 years!!!

Wow! We made it to 20 years. Yes, the Cooler Crew really formed 20 years ago on a cold Sunday morning in Chair-O-Key. A lot has changed since then.

Back then we knew each other only by screen name. Some of us still use those names; some of us only know other people by those names. As our online community has evolved, a lot of those screen names have gone by the wayside though;  for many of us, the group isn't just about the hunt anymore. For many of us the group isn't on a Pioneer Press Water Cooler-like discussion board anymore. We get together for weddings, and funerals. We get together to celebrate graduations, and birthdays and friendships, or to put on a flash mob surprise proposal. We get together to have a game night, or to watch the Vikings. We're more than just treasure hunters. We're lifelong friends; some of us managed to become life-long husbands and wives.

But still, some of our traditions continue strong! We still have the Predig Gig and the Rehash Bash, and both are incredibly well attended. Thankfully the Rehash has evolved into an indoor potluck instead of an outdoor one.

We had 60 people in the group pic at the Predig, with likely more than that who had to leave before the picture, and 47 in the Rehash pic, where a lot of folks ended up leaving before the picture. Pretty awesome turnouts if you ask me.

As always, the smorgasbord and the prizes were awesome! And so were the organizers!

The next 20

After 20 years I think its safe to say we're not going away. As I discover them, I'm continuously adding hunts to this site across Minnesota and Wisconsin. I've even got leads on hunts in other parts of the country too, which I'll add as time allows, but since they're not local, they're not a priority. I'd love it if we could find enough to fill up the calendar from January 1 to December 31 of each year. We're getting there this year. The only month last year we didn't have anything at all scheduled was November.

And let me tell you, I did the math last summer. While the prizes vary from $100 to $5000 depending on the hunt and the festival, the total purse for last year was in the neighborhood of $18,000 in cash or other prizes. That's nothing to sneeze at. But more importantly these hunts provide a way to hone your skills. Sure, you're not going to pick up St. Paul landmarks to put to use for the big show, but solving the clues helps you think outside the box, a skill that directly translates to searching for any medallion.

For those keeping score, this blog entry marks the 1700th entry on this site.

Until next year, when I have a site status update to report, happy hunting! You dig?

December. Its that time of year when we all start thinking about the holidays:

• Hanukkah
• Christmas
• Festivus
• New Year's
• Medallion Hunt
• Winter Carnival
• Super Bowl

You get the idea. For me that means trying to spend some time doing stuff for this web site, always frantically hoping I can get something new added before the hunt and the Carnival, knowing full well that if I don't, it'll be there waiting for me next December (although I am going to commit to getting the Able Minds archive into this site before the hunt). It always does, and I don't mind. But as I get myself into that particular mindset, I find myself poring over the site statistics. This year, I've come across several interesting landmarks and milestones that we've hit this year.

Landmarks, as we all know from hunting, are insanely important. When the clue writer doesn't give us any, we whine incessantly. When we get too many, again we whine incessantly. But we have hit a few this year. And I'm going to touch on them.

20 Years

The first rehash bash took place in 1998, and this site was born not long thereafter. The Rehash bash was on February 8, 1998, and as near as I can tell from the archives that I pulled together when I migrated everything over to this format, Greg Sax wrote the first entry here on the 24th. So, once this years festivities have come and gone, we will have been around for 20 years. I mentioned that in my reflections on the 2017 hunt last February. That's a long time. We've had people come and go, but the group has persisted. We've ventured out into hunts well beyond just the Pioneer Press Hunt. Between other festivals and mock hunts, there's information on 92 different medallion hunts spanning the entire year on this site.

But 92 doesn't make for an interesting landmark or milestone, unless its your birthday or you graduated in 1992 (or 1892, in which case we'd be really impressed that you were reading this page). So there's the list of hunts in the summer that I know about but haven't had the time to add in to the site yet. That'll get us to at least 100, and that is a milestone worth mentioning. Even if you discount extinct hunts, it'll be over 100.

500,000 Posts

OK, we're not quite there yet. The database only has about 285,000 posts in it right now. But there are 222,110 posts at Able Minds, and pulling that in will make for 507,000 posts in the database. That's 20 years worth of discussions within the group, folks. Sure, Facebook has made the influx fall off, but a half a million posts, 25,000 per year, is pretty impressive. And that doesn't include the first few years of posts that will be forever lost to time, before we became a group and thought to save such things.

1500 Pages

When I click "Save", this will become the 1500th page of content on the site. 

• 5 Blog Entries (mostly mine).
• 72 Calendar Events (Rehashes and Predigs and other get-togethers).
• 641 Copies of News Paper Articles (many of which while present are not available for viewing).
• 2 Polls.
• 1 Recipe (yes, we have a cookbook. Feel free to add to it!).
• 167 Stories or other pages that we wrote ourselves (most of which should really fall into blog entries, but the concept of a blog didn't really exist in 1998).
• 508 Treasure Hunts (containing 3586 clues).
• 104 Lists of Treasure Hunts.

So maybe the treasure hunt lists and invisible newspaper articles don't really count, but there's 1500 distinct pieces of content here, and, well, with an extant hunt count in the 80s, I'm adding well over 100 pages a year right now. How cool is that?

In closing, since the subject of calendar events popped up right there, we do have several coming up in the next couple of months, namely the predig and rehash bashes. Check back soon for formal announcements of both.

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 medallion 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.