prince.org Site FAQ General Prince FAQ Minneapolis FAQ Record Stores FAQ alt.music.prince FAQ PPML FAQ | prince.org Site FAQ 1. The organization
prince.org is an organization made up of dedicated Prince enthusiasts, each of which contribute to the prince.org website, prince.org. Our nickname among fans is "the org". The primary goal of the site is to be the premiere online Prince fan community, by offering a variety of ways for fans to stay in touch, share ideas, discuss the music, and in general, connect. While we'd also like to be a reference to all things Prince, the main idea is to foster the community of fans, not be a Prince encyclopedia.
In the way that you probably mean, no! We are a completely unauthorized, unofficial, independent fansite.
No. We don't work for Prince, and we don't know him. We don't know how to call him, e-mail him, etc. If you have a legitimate business reason to approach him, use industry contacts (hint: many tour management companies know someone working for him.) If you're a fan wanting an autograph, or to send him a demo, or anything else... well, your best bet is through his official site, www.npgmusicclub.com. You can write him at his studio, Paisley Park, in Minnesota, but the chances of it getting read are quite slim. We've heard even the utility bills don't always get opened... but if you still want to try, the address is in the General Prince FAQ.
Nothing. Joining and being a member of prince.org is absolutely FREE. All you need is a working e-mail account we can verify!
The main person behind the scenes is Ben Margolin. We've had a long series of generous people contribute their efforts as well over the years, though, and Ben only performs a small amount of the day-to-day heavy lifting. Here's a quick list of contributors.
Long ago (early 1990s), there was an e-mail list called the PML, (the Prince Mailing List), which changed ownership to became the PPML (the Paisley Park Mailing List). Eventually, a website was set up by a couple of volunteers to "archive" the past PPML mailings. In May, 1998, the archive site had a major harddisk crash, and went down. While recovering the data, the entire site was re-architected, and prince.org "v1.0" was publicly born on January 1st, 1999, offering much more than just archives of past PPMLs. "Version 2.0" was launched in February 2002, and added message boards and much more. "Version 3.0" came online in February 2004, with numerous enhancements and better web standards compliance. 2. Problems using the site
If you don't get any kind of error, it's likely you have either JavaScript or cookies, turned off in your browser. You need to have both turned on to log into prince.org. Sorry, that's just the way it is!
If you recently joined the site, this is normal. For the first few days (typically, 5 days) after joining, you're not allowed to send orgNotes or post in the forums. Just sit back, observe a bit, and soon enough you'll be able to weigh in with your opinion! Yes, we know lots of other sites don't do it this way. We do.
Right underneath the login area, is a link that says "Forgot your password?" Click that, and follow the directions.
Well, you're not totally out of luck... try using the 'contact us' form, explaining the situation including your username, what email address you used, and what you think your password was. We'll try to confirm, or ask you for more information, and see if we can help.
You have some sort of 'privacy' software installed on your PC which is blocking 'referrers'. Our image server expects to receive these from your browser. Find the software, and configure it to not block referrers from being sent back to the prince.org domain. 3. Special site features
Those small pictures are called 'avatars', and you upload them by going to 'MY ORG' / 'Forum Settings', and then uploading a picture. It must be less than 15K on disk, and any animation will be removed after upload, so don't bother with animated gif's. Once it's uploaded, you'll be able to see it on the 'Forum Settings' page, but it WON'T be visible to the public yet--it needs to be approved. Approval typically takes 24 hours, and you'll receive an orgNote when it's complete. Also, your avatar will show up on all your previous posts, so don't worry--it's retroactive!
Your 'profile' is sort of like your personal mini-homepage on prince.org, that you can use to tell others about yourself. It's accessed by adding your prince.org username to the end of http://www.prince.org/profile/, and feel free to bookmark it, put it in your e-mail signature, whatever. You can edit the contents at any time by visiting 'Extras' menu, 'Your account', 'Public profile'. By default, your profile is empty, so your privacy is ensured. But, lots of people choose to share some details with the other visitors, such as where they live, their favorite songs, etc.
On the profile editing page, specify a complete URL (i.e., including the "http://" part at the beginning), to a picture you have uploaded somewhere, for example in your AOL webspace if you're an AOL user. We don't 'host' the profile pictures for you--you need to find a webserver somewhere on the net that will do that for you. Sorry!
It's a message sent between prince.org users, like a simple e-mail. You can send them to other prince.org users, and when you've got one waiting for you, you'll see an animated alert icon near the top of each prince.org page, until you read it.
You can add other prince.org members to your "buddy list", with a comment for each person. This is sort of like your "address book" for sending orgNotes, and there will be more cool things you can do with your buddy list in the future. You can edit your buddy list by going to "Extras" -> "Your account" -> "Buddy list".
If someone is really annoying you, you can block them from sending you orgNotes, or e-mails (forwarded through the org), by placing their username on your 'block list'. Edit it in the same place you edit your buddy list (see previous question and answer.)
You bet, and you should read them before posting. Check 'em out at http://www.prince.org/msg/rules.html. 4. The Marketplace
You may use the Marketplace forum to post items for sale or trade (or that are "wanted"). However, to protect the rights of copyright & trademark holders, (and so that prince.org is not liable) the following rules will be vigorously enforced:
NO! Only "official" items can be offered for sale. Some items are in a "gray area", such as promos, cutouts, etc.; these are generally OK. We always reserve the right to edit your list of items for sale if we feel a specific item will cause legal difficulties for you as the seller, or prince.org as the venue.
It depends. You MAY offer to trade videotapes of performances that were PUBLICLY BROADCAST AND NOT AVAILABLE FOR SALE. So for example, a copy off the Pay-Per-View broadcast of the "Rave Un2..." performance is NOT allowed for sale, because it is/has been available for sale on DVD and video (also, it was not "publicly broadcast" since it was only available on Pay-Per-View in the US). (You may, of course, re-sell a store-bought copy of the "Rave Un2..." DVD or VHS.) Videos of broadcast performances from The Tonight Show, or American Bandstand, etc., are generally OK for trade, however. Unofficial videotapes of concerts are not allowed to be offered for sale at this time.
Yes, but the price must be the SAME or LESS than FACE VALUE (plus any ticket fees charged by the original ticket distributor--not an agent.) So for example, if you buy a concert ticket for $125 with a $4.50 service fee, you can ask up to $129.50 for it. You may ask for shipping on top of this amount if applicable, but you must only pass along the shipping cost, without any markup.
UPDATE Sorry, no. According to Section I, "Club Content" of the NPMGC Membership Agreement: "Use of Club Content. All Content is owned by the Club and/or its Content providers and may only be used for your private, personal, noncommercial use. You are not allowed to make or transfer a copy of Club Content to someone else or use any part of the Content for any public or commercial use." Offering items received as part of your membership (including members-only retail items) are therefore not allowed in the prince.org Marketplace.
In general, YES, but they must be direct links to the item pages, and each link must have a description of the item being linked to. I know this is a little bit of hassle if you're selling a lot of items at eBay, but it's almost certainly worth it for the exposure you're getting on the 'org. The reasons for this are that 1. we want people to have some idea what they're clicking over to, 2. it discourages people from trying to get around the rules by linking to items we'd prefer you not sell (or selling them ALSO, and linking to your "all items by this seller" page at eBay, and 3. eBay items disappear; our message center will be indexed for a lot longer than their items will--if someone 6 months from now wants to find an item, they can search here, find who sold it (or tried to sell it), maybe even find who bought it, and try to acquire it.
First, that's technically not a question. Secondly, we're sorry if you feel that way... the rules are designed to allow fans to buy/sell/trade items of interest to other fans, without infringing on the rights of copyright holders, or creating liability issues for prince.org. If you don't like the rules, don't post items. There's always eBay and your local swap meet, where you can still do stuff wrong, but at least we won't be helping you do it :-) 5. Technical questions
prince.org uses the latest web standards. Standards are a very good thing, as it means all "modern" browsers show pages the same way (because, they're standardized!) Currently, the best "standard" browsers are Firefox 2 (many platforms), IE 7 (on Windows), and Safari (on the Mac). I encourage you to upgrade to one of these browsers if at all possible, as older browsers may not work properly.
Your "session" at prince.org "times out" after a period of inactivity. Usually, the timeout is about 3 hours, so if you do not visit another page within that time, you will be logged out automatically. You can check the "keep me logged in" box when you log in, to avoid this.
Sure. Go to 'MY ORG' / 'Auto-login' to set this up. Or, check the "keep me logged in" box when logging in.
Generally, no. However, we will try to accomodate requests of this type if possible. You can use the 'contact us' form, when logged in under your current account, to request this. Tell us what you want it changed to, and we'll notify you by email when it's completed, if possible. After that, you'll need to use the new name to log in.
Well, it's actually completely custom software, and I don't give it out (more because it isn't really easily managed by nontechnical people, than because I don't want to share!) However, there are several excellent pieces of software that you can get for free, to run a site with similar features as the org. Try googling for 'web portal software', 'web community free software' etc. Some popular packages include postNuke, phpBB2, etc. I personally prefer to write web code in PHP (the org is), and deploy on Linux servers. I'm an advocate of Open Source software, and there are many projects that are mature, high-quality packages, to be had for free. You of course have to work hard, still, with configuring, learning about structuring them, getting content, and probably hardest of all, letting people know your site exists and getting them to visit ("marketing" if you will), but it can be rewarding. But it IS a lot of work, and building any site you expect to get a lot of traffic, requires lots of dedication and effort. But it can be done now, a lot easier than anytime in the past, for sure... so get ready to learn new things and work hard, and go for it!
Well, we run the site on a P4-2.0GHz machine with 1G of RAM, with Apache as the webserver and MySQL as the database. I use several PHP modules that you might be interested in, such as PHPMailer for sending mail, Cpdf for creating dynamic PDFs, FeedCreator for exporting to RSS 'newsfeeds', and I based my original BBCode handling routines on the ones from phpBB. Version 3.0 of the site was written mostly in the Komodo editor, and I use CVS with TortoiseCVS for revision control. I couldn't live (with Windows as my desktop) without the Cygwin tools. Personally I use Mozilla Firebird as my browser for development, with several useful extensions, including 'Live HTTP headers', 'Web Developer', 'Venkman JavaScript debugger', 'EditCSS', and 'View in IE'. If you're a web developer and you're not using Firebird with extensions, I think you're probably working way too hard. 6. Miscellaneous
Times are those at the location of the event. We list late-night events that start after midnight on their "true" date; e.g., a "Friday night" gig at Paisley Park that didn't begin until 1 am will have Saturday's date.
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