Anniversary Post 2026

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Hello to all PPPers. Saturday is the anniversary of our "early access" opening of the new site back in 2023. The official anniversary is on April 1, next Wednesday.

We are way overdo for an update on the state of the blog, so to that end I updated a lot of the how-to pages which hadn't been touched in two years. As many of you know, I got shingles in late December of 2024. And no, unfortunately that doesn't mean a new roof. Shingles is caused by the chicken pox virus which exists in your body and can go for a wander up your nervous system until if finds a spot to make a rash. In my case it went for the ophthalmic nerve and caused a host of extreme and then eventually fairly minor vision symptoms. I spent most of the winter and spring of early last year not really able to see very well. This was a mistake on my part because this winter would have been a way better time to not be able to watch the games properly.

The final state of my vision is some slight impairment that is hardly noticeable, but a stronger tendency to eyestrain. I use the site dark mode, and I use dark themes on all websites. I don't cringe anymore when I have to use a site that can't function in a a dark mode, but I don't seek them out. I find watching a game is totally fine, which was not the case for more than half of last season. Unfortunately, I missed almost the entire second PWHL season, and it's hard to squeeze those games in this year given the schedule.

What I do to manage this is to try to turn off the computer in the evening if there is no game on, and to take several hours out of the day where I also avoid the screen. I took a 10-day break last summer and I plan to do that again after the July slow down and before the T25. I can't overstate how much I think everyone should do less internet. Particularly in the evening.

How To and New Member Information

As I said, I went through and updated various site pages. Now, I know the internet for many has shrunk to the size of your phone and whatever the top post here is where you go to comment, and that's it, but there are a couple of menus of helpful links you're skipping over.

At the top of the page is the main menu and you will find all sorts of useful things there: the How To pages, the Top 25 posts, as well as some other popular groups of posts, the archive of all posts, and your Account link.

As for the How To, the important stuff is here:

At the bottom of the site is a footer with some links that are less likely to be needed.

Now a confession about all those helpful pages. One of them is a contact page which has an email link for the site email. I absolutely and utterly hate email. I think every single person should think three times before they send email and then just don't hit send. I do so rarely I forget how Gmail words. I "forget" to check that email address a lot. I will try to do better, but it is absolutely swamped with "Looking for opportunity to do a paid collaboration," crap that is basically wanting to use the site for spam purposes.

Spam Spam Spam

Which brings me to the other thing. When you sign up for the site, you have the option to make a username. If you don't, it defaults to your email address. If you don't ever plan to actually comment, that's fine, and you can carry on, but the problem comes when I go to clean out the spam member accounts, of which there is a current massive influx.

There is some theorizing that this constant flood of fake members aren't spammers, but bots programmed to test sites to find valid email addresses for nefarious purposes. So they look like real people. Surname, numbers, given name, and just lately they are all from US locations and use Outlook emails.

Make yourself look like a person when you sign up, is what I'm driving at. Make a username.

I fully support the desire of anyone to just have an account but never comment, and I don't want to hold out a hoop for you to jump through, but it would help with the 100 or so deletions I do every few weeks.

Money Money Money

And the final thing. Money! If you have an annual subscription, and you first subscribed during early access or when the site opened, it's about to renew. If you want or need to adjust your payment information or subscription amounts, the Account link in the top menu will get you to the right place.

For the new people who really don't understand subscribing or maybe didn't even know we ask you to pay here, this is the gist:

I ended up with this site on about one-month's notice when the former owner decided to divest. I chose a hosting platform that offers full functionality and can support the scale of traffic we get at key times. This costs money. I chose a commenting system to integrate with that platform that is in active development, has no ads, and is reliable and fast. This also costs money.

I did not build the back end or the comments, but I have extensively modified the look of the site, added features and functionality within the areas I have access to, and am the only person who maintains all of that. The last big design was dark mode, something I did as a project to improve my skills, and for which present me thanks past me every day.

We don't do a lot of pushing for financial support here, but come T25, you'll see some regular reminders because that festival of prospect arguing is one of the best things about a site like this. It used to be all done by hand on a spreadsheet, and I've gradually made that more automated so we can focus on the article writing but it is still a lot of work to get to the fun parts.

The financial support you all have chosen to provide this site has stayed very stable over our three years. Which is fairly unusual I think, although this isn't a new blog, it's a very old blog. But the bottom line is, we can't expand beyond the scope of the site now unless the paid membership grows.

I feel like this stasis is actually very positive. It puts to bed forever the idea that we would have to put ads on the site to keep it alive. It makes it very unlikely I'd need to dial back the quality of the hosting deal (and end up with days you can't get the site to load) and we won't have to go to a less feature-rich commenting system. It means we can carry on as we are while the Leafs themselves are in so much flux.

That of course, depends on the level of support not declining. I don't pay any attention to who is a paid subscriber and who isn't. That information is not obvious, and I'm very good at intentional obliviousness about that sort of thing. I absolutely understand if the rising costs of things like SN or TSN or your groceries means you have to reconsider supporting PPP.

I hope you don't. And if you've never been a paid member, please consider it. This site exists because of the subset of people who pay for it. It will continue only as long as that continues.

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