prince.org staff blog

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

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 all… some of you may be aware of the WebSheriff stuff going on, which has affected most of the big Prince fan sites, with each getting a DMCA infringement notice. Basically, this is a letter from an authorized agent of Prince, saying that something on the site infringes his copyright, and must be removed. The interesting thing is that, as part of the DMCA law in the USA, the letter is sent to the service provider, not the site owner directly. So for example, the company that we rent servers from, got the letter and passed it along to us. The letter basically stated (I will include more details later), that there were ~3,500 images in our ‘gallery’ section, that infringed Prince’s copyrights, trademark, or other intellectual property. The way the DMCA notice works, is that the site owner has two choices: 1. take the material down, or 2. file a counter notice to say the material is not infringing, and that they accept being sued within 14 days.

Now, there’s no way that all the images we were asked to remove were infringing–it included images of people’s tattoos, their cars, scans from books that had nothing to do with Prince, newspaper clippings, wire image bureau images, etc. Lots of stuff which might be copyrighted, or not, but certainly, images and images of items, that Prince does not own the rights to (under the DMCA, the rights owner of the specific item being asked to be removed must file the complaint). There were also other problems with the specifics of the request that lead us at prince.org to believe it’s invalid, and we’re following up on that angle as well. Put simply, we believe this to be a bogus, incomplete, and certainly overly broad, even fairly sloppy, request. (In this article I don’t want to get into the “is this fair” or “why is Prince doing this” issues; that’s the topic for another day, and another message.)

That said, you may be surprised to learn that I have decided to temporarily make these images unavailable, nearly 3,500 of them. I would prefer not to, of course, and believe there is no legitimate reason why I should… but this is a purely practical matter. Our service provider, the good people (really!) we rent servers from, aren’t legally in a position to debate the correctness of each image and the request–this isn’t their primary role. They will simply take the ’safe’ road and shut down our server (or something similar, with the same effect) unless we remove them, or else they become liable to be sued. The DMCA is imbalanced in this regard, but this is the reality (remember, this was enacted by the same people who brought you the Patriot Act!) So, essentially, I’ve disabled access to these images so that while prince.org can secure a thorough legal analysis, we aren’t shut down. After all, the image gallery is a small part of the site, and I wouldn’t want to risk having the chat and forums go offline while we wrangle over this… there is principle, and honor, involved here, but this site exists to serve you, the community visitor and site member, and if we’re offline we’re not serving anyone, no pun intended

So, that’s the quick update… there’s fewer images in the gallery right now, but they’re not gone, we’re just working through legal silliness. The site will continue to run and provide the unofficial, semi-random, relatively unfettered and hopefully entertaining discussions it always has. Watch the staff blog for continuing updates…

[Edited to fix the grammar on the title… feh! -Ben]

Got to spend some time working on the org today, and here’s the results:

1. Fixed bug: the “explanation” for the random quote under the navigation, wasn’t explaining anything (was a blank popup window).
2. Fixed bug: adding/removing from the buddy and blocked lists wasn’t working.
3. Change: people were complaining about the new “pray” emoticon, that it didn’t look much like prayer, but a lot like begging. Then they begged for the old prayer icon back So, that’s what I did. The old one was restored and the new one was renamed as “beg”.
4. New feature: when you get a new orgnote, you get an email about it, with a link to go read the note directly. This is really cool for me, since I don’t log in to the org religiously, but I do need to keep up on emails. And of course, it’s an option–you can turn it off in the “MY ORG” section, under “Notifications”. (I also cleaned up the preferences slightly, combining the “newsletter” (nonexistent feature), orgNote notifications, and event alerts, all into a single “page” under Notifications.)
5. Also, yesterday, I fixed the “profiles get trashed when editing” bug. Sorry about that one! I fixed something else too at the same time, but can’t recall what exactly.

I hope everyone enjoys the changes and I apologize for any inconvenience the bugs might have caused!

There is a new documentary (info here) about Prince, made by 1xtra (BBC radio, I guess). They are looking for a couple (at least) London-based fans 25 or younger to be interviewed/take part in a discussion Wednesday (TOMORROW). Anyone want to volunteer? Remember, the criteria is:

• Live in London (and be there on Wednesday)
• Under 25
• Prince fan (and hopefully, willing to pimp prince.org on the radio )

If you want to participate, please e-mail me your contact info (name, email, phone number) ASAP to ben@prince.org. Let’s represent! Thanks!