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

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!

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!

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!

You may have noticed some changes to the site tonight, although they’re mostly minor. Mainly, it’s the opening of this ’staff blog’ area, but also I’ve changed all the site URLs to now be just “prince.org” instead of “www.prince.org”. I think if you’re using a web browser it’s pretty obvious you’re on the “world wide web”, and this just makes the URLs shorter, which is nice. The old URLs should all continue to work just fine, however–they are automatically redirected to the new, shorter version.

The search box is also reinstated in the upper-right corner on every page–and it does actually work! It’s powered by Google, and the results aren’t necessarily perfect, but it’s a lot better than nothing. It should improve over time as they index more and more of the site, as well.

Probably slightly less welcome for everyone is the return of advertising. In the forums, there are now Google ads after the first post on each page. I hope they’re not too annoying, and even better, I hope you occasionally find something of interest and give it a click. I didn’t plaster the site with the ads, but it’s an experiment, especially with Prince going on tour again and lots of new visitors coming to the site, for me to see if I can make enough to offset the monthly costs of the site, with ads. I am also cooking up a way for you guys to opt-out of seeing the ads if you so desire (for a small donation), but that isn’t all figured out yet, so just stay tuned to the blog for updates on that.

Update: I have now reproduced the bug that has been reported about the blog section logging you out. That sucks! I’m tracking it down… for now a workaround is to use the “remember me” checkbox when logging in (you can always have it “forget” you by clicking ‘log out’ later). But I will definitely be working on fixing this issue, sorry for the inconvenience!

Update2: I tracked down the bug, and have fixed it. However, it’s possible there may be side effects of generating small bugs elsewhere in the site. I’ll be on the lookout, and do mention weirdness you encounter.