The Utah Division of Wildlife Resources (DWR) hosted a discussion forum on their Web site from June 30, 2004 until Sept.5, 2007. During those three years, the popularity of the DWR forum steadily increased and with that popularity came, according to the DWR, "increased problems."
Although tame by Internet standards, the forum discussions often centered around wildlife management issues, government officials and influential hunting organizations. These kinds of discussions, combined with the typical back-and-forth banter common to discussion forums, were an ongoing source of political embarrassment for the DWR. There were several occasions when the DWR management nearly shut down the forums.
The final straw, according to sources within the DWR, occurred when the Humane Society reportedly wrote a letter to the Salt Lake Tribune (to our knowledge, never published) claiming that the DWR was an accomplice to abusive and cruel dog training practices. The letter reportedly cited a particular discussion in the "Hunting dog" section of the forum. You can be the judge by reading it yourself.
Why are these archived forums here?
One of the Utah Wildlife Network moderators, 12 Volt Man, obtained access to the DWR discussion forum database by filing a GRAMA request. The state GRAMA legislation legally obligates state agencies to provide access to non-confidential government records. As a public service to the Utah hunting and fishing community, we decided to publish the DWR forum database here.
What is missing?
Through the GRAMA request, only the database was made available. The templates that gave the look and feel to the DWR site were not supplied. The DWR also did not supply various other associated files that gave the look and feel to the old site; for example, avatars, graphics, style sheets, etc.
The old DWR site contained an online photo gallery. Although the DWR supplied the photos from that gallery, the gallery itself was add-on software that is incompatible with this version of the underlying phpBB software that this forum is built around. There are other small problems throughout the pages that also pertain mostly to incompatibilities between underlying forum software; for example, HTML tags do not work in posts here, but did work in the DWR's site.
The DWR also deleted e-mail addresses and private messages from the database before delivering it to us. We assume that this information was deemed private or confidential.
Read-only access
We debated about opening up these archived forums for additional posts, but decided against it. Doing so would have interfered with the historical record and would have caused confusion with our new site and the posts there. However, feel free to copy posts and paste them into the new forum. Everything here is up for discussion in the new forum.
Thanks!
The Utah Wildlife Network
