prince.org staff blog

In an effort to bring some sort of reasoning behind one of our most misunderstood or misconstrued actions, the following should be noted:

Moderation is a process. We need to balance many things when we consider any action taken on a member’s account. Questions we ask ourselves… like, is this being done maliciously? Is it a joke? Can people tell it’s a joke? Have they done this with full knowledge of the rules? Etc.

Some things tend to tread the line of what’s allowed and what’s not. In this case… Alternate Accounts. As stated by Ben, no person may have more than one account active at any one time on the Org. Some people feel the need to create two, three or even more Alternate Accounts than that. We know that most are harmless and most likely utilize this ability to do so to get around the posting limits. Some use them as different personalities. Occasionally we get someone who uses them to harass or post things that shouldn’t be posted. Some are used to troll or bait. Others create Alt Accts to get around being temp banned or permabanned. Some are used to create a “celebrity account” so that they can partake in discussions as that famous person. We know if (for example) Morris Day were going to create an account here, it most likely would not be created as “MorrisDay” with his picture used as an avatar.

Rest assured, we know this is happening and know who the Orgers are. So, why do we allow this to continue when it’s clearly against Ben’s wishes? Most “Alt Accts” are harmless. We take that into consideration and moderate them accordingly.

We, as Moderators, reserve the right to ban any Alt Acct at our discretion – simply for existing. Again, it is against Ben’s wishes.

Not too long ago we had a crop of politically minded Alt Accts pop up to make fun of, or bait/slam the candidates and/or the people who supported them. We discussed their existence amongst ourselves and came up with the decision to delete them all, as it wasn’t worth the effort to continually have to moderate them. We knew they were Alt Accts, and we knew they weren’t the primary accounts of the Orgers who used them. So we took them out of the equation.

So what does all this mean? Here’s a quick break down:

* Alt Accts are not allowed.
* We can/will delete them if/when we’re alerted to wrong-doings from an Alt Acct.
* We could let them continue until other more serious rules are broken under the guise of the Alt Acct.
* This includes Alt Accts in the ChatRoom as well.
* Alt Accts created to get around a temp ban or permaban will be deleted immediately.
* As always, Moderators have final say on any deletions of Alternative Accounts without expectation of an explanation.

Thank you,

June7 on behalf of TheModSquad

Whew. That was fun (not!)

My apologies for our outage for the last 5 days. Not that it was my fault, but I still feel bad about it. I know many of you have missed your “org fix” as one person wrote to me in email. In case you didn’t get the mail I sent out (some people seem not to have — reminder, check the email address the org has on file for you!), we were down starting last Saturday night, due to an electrical fire and subsuquent explosion (!) where our servers are hosted, in Texas, at theplanet.com. This was a catastrophic failure for their power systems, and while things like a normal power cut, would not have caused any problem, an explosion destroying much of their underground wiring, certainly did Over 9,000 servers were affected, approximately 7,000 customers, including, of course, our beloved org. Fortunately, no one was hurt in the fire and explosion!

The folks at theplanet.com worked round the clock for days to restore power, and finally restored it to all the servers about a day ago. The org wouldn’t come right back up, however, and after some manual intervention on their part, we were able to return to service about 6 hours ago. My thanks to the good folks at The Planet, and I really appreciate everyone’s patience while we waited for them to slog through the repairs. It’s great to be back!!

Two months ago when I started working on moving us to a new server, I had hoped to have everything done within a week. I spent about a week’s worth of effort on getting everything set up and installed, etc., and still wasn’t ready for the crucial last set of steps to actually move the entire site over. I’m going to be working on that some more this week, hopefully even tonight, and try to get us onto the faster equipment by the end of May.

Please understand if the site is down for a while, and it may also take time for your ISP to update their DNS cache (i.e., to point to the new site’s address). Best case, that takes only a few minutes, but worst case, a couple of days.

Anyhow, I’ll try to have meaningful messages posted up on the old site as I make progress.

Ben

All:
Sometime Sunday night (I’m not exactly sure when I’ll get around to this, but probably after 9PM Pacific time), I will be taking the org down for a little while for database maintenance, and one of the critical steps towards moving the site to new (faster!) server.  I expect the downtime to only be about an hour. I will try to have a “maintenance” page up during the process, as well.

If all goes well, within a week or so we should be all migrated to the new machine, however, which I think will be a noticeable speed improvement, so it’s all for a good cause!

Thanks for your understanding,
Ben

G’day mates! (See, this can only get classier from here on…)

A reporter for the Melbourne Sunday Age, is trying to get in touch with a few long-time, knowledgeable Australian Prince fans to interview for a piece he’s doing to coincide with Prince’s 50th birthday.

If you’re interested, and think you can speak about all facets of Prince’s career (of course including how much prince.org means to you!  No, just kidding… well, sort of ), then drop me a line at ben@prince.org with your phone number and email and I’ll foward it on.

Throw another shrimp on the… ehh, I can’t even force myself to type the rest of that — just help out this reporter if you can,
Ben

Hi guys,

Just a quick note to say that we’ve got some additions and upgrades planned. First, more moderators should be coming online soon… just working out some final logistics, and then we should have some much-needed additional support. Secondly, I’ve secured a much faster server to replace the creaky old one we’re currently using… so, that should make the site a bit zippier when it’s rolled out, probably in 2-3 weeks (depends how long it takes me to get everything migrated over and working.)

That’s it! Just thought everyone would like to know (and thanks for your patience with the understaffed moderator situation…)

The Org in Moderation

With prince.org at its highest membership levels ever, activity here has increased excessively.  Threads and posts need more moderation presence than ever before.  Prince is doing his share too, keeping us in the news and creating and/or doing what he does best: staying controversial!  

prince.org members are the best on the web, and we consistently have our message boards filled with conversation that would make your mama proud.  However, we still get our share of those who feel the need to share something, anything, with others that should have been left on their hard drive - regardless of the posted rules.  We moderators have our hands full.  (Especially poor Mach in P&R!)  This being an election year, the P&R forum has stayed especially busy. 

It has become evident that we need to look into appointing more moderators to this site.  Not because of a lack of involvement by the mods that are already donating hour after hour here, but because there’s just so much more activity going on around here!  It’d be nice to have some moderators here in the time zones when most of us Americans are sleeping.

If you ar-e interested in applying to become a moderator at prince.org, please state so here, and/or email Ben directly at ben@prince.org. Give us your reasons, which forums you wish to moderate and why. Special attention will be given to those applying from non-US time zones (all foreign nations)!

Thank you for surfing prince.org international… next time you surf, surf prince.org international…   

-June7

Wow, interesting. So PrinceFansUnited (prince.org, PrinceFams, and Housequake) put up a site to express our displeasure with what we interpreted as legal bullying. The press latched on to the story (without our prompting) and gave it a lot of (mostly virtual) ink, predominantly negative toward Prince. Today we find out that Prince would like to engage us in more civil talks, oh and also, he has created a ‘response’ song. He even wants us to host the song on our protest site (yes, we thought it was weird, too.) And then he registers a domain very similar to ours (princefamsunited.com) and puts the song there with no explanation.

Now, don’t get me wrong, the song is funky as hell, probably one of the best tracks in recent years. but… it sounds like the lyrics might be trying to dis us.

So… is he trying to end hostilities, or take it to the next level? Who knows, this is Prince we’re dealing with. Obviously, the end to this story hasn’t been written yet… although we do seem to be proving the theory that his greatest music comes from being pissed off!

The highly-respected Prince Podcast hosted by longtime orger (from day one!) Michael Dean did an interview with me last night. It was fun to talk with MDean about the history of the Org, music, and my feelings about the current situation. It’s pretty long, but if you’re curious to know a little more about me and the org, worth a listen!

You can download it directly from his entry about the prince.org interview, or grab it via iTunes. Heck, why not subscribe to the feed and get some of the past episodes while you’re at it? It’s good listening… he’s always got interesting guests (well, except for last night :)) and fascinating conversations.

Personally, I don’t know if I thanked the org moderators enough in the podcast… that’s who is really responsible for the site’s success, especially the last 5 years. Maybe we can do a podcast with some of the mods one day? That would be fun! What do you guys think? (Also, vote in the poll on the homepage!)

Hi guys, while dealing with the various issues around WebSheriff etc., I came across this pretty interesting article from last weekend’s Washington Post… check it out! http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/18/AR2007101802453.html

Here’s a small excerpt–but there is much more in the full article:

But recently — in part because of backlash among users and advocacy groups who say copyright holders are abusing the law and wrongfully taking down content — the challenges to these copyright claims also appear to be increasing.

“These companies are trying to shoot a mouse with an elephant gun,” said Gigi Sohn, director of Public Knowledge, a public-policy think tank that focuses on intellectual property. “They like to accuse their customers, the music fans and TV fans out there, of not respecting the law, but I don’t think they respect the law.”

We feel the same way, especially with the sloppiness of WebSheriff’s slapdash and ridiculously broad DMCA request. I hadn’t thought of actually suing them over it, but now that I see some folks are going for it, it’s something to consider. Interesting stuff!