This remnant will be replaced soon. The FAQ is back, with a new design! What is the Phish.Net? Basic Info via Email: Send any message to info@www.phish.net to get an automatic welcome/help response, with current information on the best sources for info online. Send a message of "subscribe phish-news YOURNAME" to majordomo@www.phish.net to get tour announcements, setlists, news, and notabe updates to phish.net and phish.com via the phish-news@phish.net mailing list. Pager service: Setlists, ticket releases, and other news (sent out over phish-news) is also distributed (for FREE) to pagers, cell phones, and PDAs -- see alerta.net. Service concerns should go to support@alerta.net. Introduction: The Phish.Net is an Internet-based forum and community for discussion, review, education, and more concerning the musical adventure Phish. (Are you a newbie?) As Page said in an interview published in the LA Times July 1997, the Phish.Net "was started by the fans, for the fans, and it's about the fans, and also about us. They'll talk about anything. They try to read things into the lyrics and discuss rumors about the band." And, oh, so much more.... Organization? The Phish net is administered (to the extent that there is any administration) by volunteers. The Phish Net is not a "board" or a "BBS", although parts of it (so to speak) are found on BBSes (see below). There are many others groups like the Phish net, each concentrating on a different topic, although the Phish.Net is extensive and documented to a degree surpassing most others. Location(s) of the Phish.Net Newsgroup-Based: The Phish Net is primarily a Usenet News group, rec.music.phish, although it extends to many reaches of cyberspace. (There are even other Usenet newsgroups, such as alt.binaries.phish and mail.phish. There are perhaps 60,000 participants, dozens of online documents, and scores of web sites. Charlie Dirksen <dirkch00@dons.ac.usfca.edu> noted that this newsgroup is "dedicated (in theory) to the discussion of Phish's music. You will notice material that is not Phish-related, but do not be discouraged. It is simply Phish fans having fun making idiots of themselves, whether consciously or unconsciously (be careful about what to take seriously)." Email gateway: You can post to rmp via email by sending a message to rmp@www.phish.net Posts that are encouraged (taken from the rec.music.phish charter): Reviews of shows, tapes, songs and jams Lyric transcriptions and interpretation Discussion of the merits of a particular show Phish sightings in the media Stories of a Phish-influenced event in your life Guitar tabulature Trade requests that are at least 2 weeks after the show you want and don't include your entire tapelist Ticket sales, as long as the price is face value or less Any other posts that are Phish-related (remember those posts that you liked while lurking? write posts like them! :) Posts that are discouraged: Advertisements for merchandise or services, Phish-related or otherwise Binary attachments (please post all files in alt.binaries.phish) Trade requests with your full tapelist attached (just include a few teaser shows) Trade requests within two weeks of the show you want Ticket grovels (if people have extra tickets, they will post an offer; if you MUST post a grovel, include it at the end of a real post) Ticket sales for more than the face value of the ticket Posts that contain so many grammatical and spelling errors that they cannot be understood by anyone Top picks are digested to a mailing list. (This service was previously offered by Rosemary and, irregularly, Benjy.) Trey Parker posts his picks of the Best of RMP Other newsgroups: There are also mail.phish and rec.binaries.phish Note that you can post to rec.music.phish by sending mail to the phish.net gateway, at either rmp@www.phish.net or rmp-gw@www.phish.net. PLEASE NOTE that these emails will post your message to tens of thousands of people, so do NOT expect a personal response from any particular individual. Web: The focal point on the web is http://www.netspace.org/phish, aka http://www.phish.net. There is an official (band-sponsored and -sanctioned) web site at www.phish.com. By far the leading fan page is Andy Gadiel's. Mailing Lists: Phish-news (replaces phish-info) FahtHarpua From The Phishtank Benji's Eigest: Benjy Eisen started another digest service, much like Rosemary's (with an apparent focus on show reviews, at least during Fall 1997 tour -- see the archived digests). To subscribe, send email to listserv@www.phish.net (or listserv@www.phish.net, same thing) with "subscribe benjys-digest yourfirstname yourlastname" as the message body. The Eigest also has a FAQ (frequently asked questions) file. Note: The Eigest is sometimes irregular, so don't be surprised if you go a few weeks (or more) before getting your one. A corrollary/replacement has been considered, explored, and developed. Rosemary's Digests: Rosemary Mackintosh formerly moderated a second series of digests, which included only the most relevant and interesting of posts to rec.music.phish. Many Phish.Netters subscribed to Rosemary's Digests; for many of them, those digests were their only connection to rec.music.phish, because they found the volume on the newsgroup too heavy to contend with. Rosemary's efforts are appreciated and missed (and spoken of highly by Mike in a recent interview.) Her 9/8/97 departure post was as follows: Hello Phish Fans, I have come to the sad conclusion that Rosemary's Digest is no longer something that I love doing, and because of this realization I have decided to stop producing the Digest. I know that this decision will disappoint many of you and I apologize for that. Many of you have sent me warm thanks for the Digest. I feel really rewarded for the work that I did on it, and I'm stopping not because people aren't grateful, but because it seems more like a chore than like fun anymore. It's been a good two years. See you around rec.music.phish! -Rosemary Other niches: The Phish.Net has also expanded to IRC as well as several bulletin board conferences, such as on the WELL. There's a community of virtual investors trading "stock" in Phish via the Rogue Market; several Web rings of Phish fans' pages (The Phishing Net, The Phish Web Ring, Helping Phriendly Ring, Charapata's Phish Ring (see below), Phish's Paradise Tape Trading ring, and Phish Paradise Webring (both unofficial); a PhishCast channel (archive) on the PointCast Network; a group of ICQ users (alt list); and web chat rooms such as PhishSpace and PhishChat. There's even a book chapter written about the community. And, the community is writing a book, a fan-based book about Phish for charity via the Mockingbird Foundation. And, of course, numerous fan pages exist. (If you have any information on additional Phish-related niches of cyberspace, please email Ellis.) In October 1996, a separate mailing list started (one of many Phish-related mailing lists now in existence) for DAT traders of Phish. The list has changed servers several times, starting off at Berkeley, then to rift.com and now at digiphish.org. History of the Phish.Net Origins: The seed of the Phish.Net was planted in early 1990 as a CC/alias group of emailers, then became a mail reflector (phish@world.std.com) in the summer of 1990. Users sent email messages to a single site which distributed all of the messages, by email, to all of the users. The group was small enough -- perhaps fifty people -- that a list was collected of member's names, emails, geographic location... even occupations. Both the mailing list format, and the maintainence of a list of members, became untenable as the group grew and participation expanded. Growth: The group became digestified (meaning messages were sent in collected daily-or-so batches rather than individually) via phish@fuggles.virginia.edu in the spring of 1991, and later moved to Brown -- first on the Brown Mainframe; then to fringe.cis.brown.edu, a Unix machine; then to a NeXt workstation. On April 3, 1994, Lee Silverman proposed to the Phish.Net community that money was pooled by Phish.Netters from all over the globe to buy a machine to house the Phish.Net archives and through which to route the community's messaging; the NetSpace machine debuted June 8. Current: The Phish.Net no longer comes in email (reflected or digestified) form, and is focused on the Usenet newsgroup rec.music.phish (started 3/3/92), but extends elsewhere as well (see below). The Usenet (like the Internet generally) can be wild and unwieldy; a periodic welcome from Charlie Dirksen may help ease you in. (Look for it under the subject heading "WELCOME TO LAMEHENDGE" or something like that.) The complete Phish.Net digests include every post to rec.music.phish up to the date of the last digest, in June 1996. Most posts to rec.music.phish since March 1995 should be findable on DejaNews. Email access: If you only have access to e-mail, use these locations: Send mail to the entire community to: rmp@www.phish.net or rmp-gw@www.phish.net The archive address, to which you should address requests for the Helping Friendly Book, FAQ File, etc. from the Phish.Net archives. The administrator addresses, to whom you should send comments, corrections, and submissions to the various archive files. There is often an IRC channel, #phish, though that doesn't always refer to phans. The Phish Workers group has an archive of posts. Offline Attention: The Portland Journal had a short piece about the Phish.Net. If you see other references in print or other broadcast, please let us know. :) Culture: Even the initial email network provided a cadre of online fans among whom a small culture began to take shape by the fall of 1990. Throughout, several resources had been created which served (and still do) as collective memory and guidance. The first Helping Phriendly Book emerged in mid-1991, and the first FAQ Phile was posted 11/19/91, by Lee Silverman. These early resources were passed via email (first manually, then automatically), then available for download via gopher and ftp, and finally (?) via the World Wide Web. Lee and Ben Tanen got the original web site off the ground, while Keith Martin, Michael Weitzman, and Dan Shoop took the HPB from ASCII to HTML. Rosemary McKintsosh, then Eddie Dinel, then Rob Johnson served as webmasters. Influence/Consequences: The very founding of the Netspace site was of great important. Netspace now provides a setting for a large number of projects at Brown. Phish/Dionysian have turned to the online Phish.Net community for input on several occassions, notably for compiling A Live One. More History of the Phish.Net: Here're two early posts from Lee Silverman, the original Phish.Net archivist. The first (posted by <lee@brown.edu> mid-1993?) gives a history of the early origins of the archives; the second (posted by <pandion@brown.edu>/<phish-archives@fuggles.acc.virginia.edu> mid- to late-1992?) explains one of the significant server moves in Phish.Net history. 1 ...what seems to be a long time ago, when the phish-net was a small community of 50 or so folks who received a digest or (gasp) every individual post via email, people began to realize that a lot of useful information was being posted to the phish-net, and a lot of it was being lost because it wasn't being stored or compiled anywhere. I took on the job of compiling a set of files on my account, (I think I starting with the FAQ, but my memory is a little vague...) and distributing those files to anyone who sent me mail asking for them. Marc Roleau aggreed to set up a mail forwarding account on fuggles, originally called phish-questions but then changed to phish-archives, that would be a place for people to mail in requests - this account simply forwards the mail on to me at whatever account Marc specifies. My motivation for taking on this task was simply that I wanted to do something more to benefit the phish-net community. I began by keeping the FAQ and a copy of all the lyrics and stories that were posted to the net, and editting them into a phile that was in semi-readable format. Sometime around then, Richard Stern and John Friedman published the "first edition" of the Helping Phriendly Book. I'm not sure if they asked me or if I volunteered, but what ended up happening was that I got a copy of the HPB so that people could send a request to phish-archives and I could send them the HPB. In this way, the phish-archives mail address became the central address to which people sent requests for files. Gradually, as more information was posted to the net, I tried to compile more of that information, and hence maintain more files. The FAQ, interviews file, stories file, and chords file were all done mostly by myself, while I was also trying to maintain the other files. You can imagine or remember the results; as the net grew into a usenet group, and the number of people on the digestified list grew into the hundreds, the number of postings grew as did the number of requests for files that came in to phish-archives. It became harder for me to keep track of all the information that was posted to the net, maintain the files, *and* distribute them. So I did what I could; I began to see myself more as a distributor of information than a maintainer of information, and as a result the files that I had been maintaining didn't get updated nearly as often as they should. I tried to set up an ftp site using my account on the Brown mainframe, but as a few of you might remember, it was a major pain in the ass to get anything useful from that site. This was the sorry state of things until about January of this year, when the archive site underwent a major shift in direction. I managed to convince somebody in Brown's Computing and Information Services Dept. to give me an account on their machine (fringe) and let me have some disk space, and I created a new archive site. At first my motivation for this was simply so that ftp would work better, so that people could get to the archive more easily and quickly, and to take some of the load off the phish-archives mail. But with the increased disk space and a better operating system available, I tried to add even more information to the archive site; graphics, tapelists, etc. Maintaining the archive site and answering requests for files (sometimes 30 a day!) had become a job in its own, and I knew I was doing a shoddy job maintaining the information on the archive. I think the first file to go on the archive site that wasn't maintained by myself (besides the HPB, which is another tale) was the chords file, maintained by Eric Berman. The idea of having somebody else maintain the files so I could concentrate on maintaining the archive site seems like it should have hit me over the head a long time ago, but maybe I'm just not that smart, or maybe I thought I could do it all myself (I can get like that sometimes, I know); in any case it seemed to me that having other folks maintain the files was the best thing to do. I knew there were many people on the net who wanted to make a larger contribution than just posting, but didn't know what they should do. For some of the files, I asked a few people to take over the maintainence; for others, people volunteered to take them over, pointing out that they were WAY out of date and needed to be updated, and suggesting ways in which they could be improved. In this way, two things were accomplished: first, and most importantly, the information was updated and made available to the net community. Second, and almost as important, it gave a few people who wanted to make a larger contribution to the net the opportunity to do so in an organized manner. Lastly, giving the responsibility to someone else meant one less thing that I had to take care of, so I could focus my efforts on the archive site itself. I think I need to expand on this thought, because it's become central to my idea of the archive site, and of the net in general, and I'd like everyone to understand where I'm coming from - that's really the point of this message. I'm not very good at explaining this, so please bear with me. There are alot of people who read the phish-net simply as entertainment, some who read and post to get information about the band, and many who simply read because they *like* to read the net. This last group of people are part of an ever-growing group who see the phish-net as something of a place for friends with a common interest (phish) to gather and "hang out", talk about Phish or whatever, and just enjoy the company of other phish-heads. It's because of this group of people (of which I feel like I'm a part) that the phish-net "feels" like a community. As many of you know and have experienced before, people in a community tend to feel more attached to that community when we can make some kind of contribution to the community; when we can spend our time and effort to create something special and then to give it away to our friends. That's why many people like to spend their spare time doing projects for the phish-net. It gives us a sense of belonging to the community, and it makes us feel good about ourselves. Thus, when I ask somebody to take over the maintainence of one of the Phish-archives files, it's not just because I think they have the time and energy to do a good job, but because I think and hope that it will bring them closer to the rest of the phish-net community, and in that way strengthen the overall feeling of community on the net. It's a self-feeding mechanism; the more people add to the community, the more we feel like a community, and the more people will want to add to it. The idea is not to create a central group of phish-net elitists, but to expand the phish-net community to include more people. Also, and very importantly, when a person is given or takes on a responsibility within the community they tend to feel some ownership for the job, and thus try to do a good job because it's *their* contribution to the phish-net community. It's for that reason that I try not to change the files that people send in or make *too many* suggestions to the the people who maintain the files, because while I may have some ideas about what the file should look like, the file is theirs to maintain, and their idea of what it should be are more important than mine. Of course, the person also becomes responsible for taking suggestions from the net (including myself just as any other netter) and incorporating them if s/he thinks they are a good idea or not incorporating them if s/he thinks that the idea doesn't jibe with his/her ideas of what the file should be. So far, there haven't been any problems with the folks who are maintaining the files for the archive, and I'd be suprised to hear of any problems in the future. You may be able to see where I'm heading with this. I have come to see the phish-archive not as a project that "belongs" to me, but as a project the belongs to the entire net community. The archive has become a forum for people who want to make a larger contribution to the net-community; a place for them to put their contribution and take the contributions of others. Taking on a phish-archives project is not only a way to make information available to everyone in the phish-net community, but is also a way to bring yourself closer to that community, and to feel more a part of the whole. With that view in mind, I think I need to explain my feelings about my job as the archivist. Reading this message, it probably sounds like I have put myself in charge of an awful lot. I think perhaps that's true. Who am I to judge who would be a good maintainer of the archive files? Who am I to judge what should and should not go on the archive site? Who am I to set a direction for the archive and the net as a whole? Nobody, really - I'm just the person who volunteered first. But just as I try to allow the people who maintain the archive-site files to have their own views on what the files should be like, I have my own views on what the archive itself should be like. I'll be the first to admit that I feel a lot of ownership for the archive site. I'd like to think that I'm doing a good job, and that if people have any problems with the way I'm doing things that they would tell me about it so I can either explain myself or change my ways. If anyone has any feedback for me I'm more than happy to accept it, just as I hope that the people who maintain the archive site files would accept feedback about how to improve the files. As the phish-net archivist, I see myself having two responsibilties: the first is to distribute all the information that the archive-file maintainers have put together, and that other people have contributed to the archive site. I answer the phish-archives mail, and try to keep the archive site accessible over the net. Until recently, the archive has been available via ftp and gopher, but ftp access has been taken down temporarily (Gopher is still running). Partially for this reason, the archive site is going to move to a new machine this summer, where we will once again have ftp and gopher access. The other reason for the move is that I'd like to try to expand the archive again, adding a World Wide Web server so that the archive site can become one huge hypertext document that netters can browse. This is an idea that I've had for a while, but until recently I had no idea how I'd do it. Several people sent me mail with suggestions and volunteered to do some of the work, and we are already starting to help put the pieces in place for this to happen. The other responsibility that I see myself having is to coordinate the people who are doing major projects for the Phish net. There are a few reasons why I think I need to do this. Perhaps most important is that there a lot of people on the net who want to make a large contribution, and I'd hate to see two or three people duplicating each other's work and wasting effort when there's so much more that can be done. If, for example, someone suggests that they want to do a project like "I want to compile a collection of chords to all the Phish songs", I can let them know that somebody has already done a lot of work on that, and that they might be able to contribute in a more helpful way if they worked with the person who maintains the chords file, instead of starting their own version of the file in "competition" with the chords file that already exists. Secondly, I'd like to be able to easily integrate everyone's contribution to the archive site, and I can only do that if people know the restrictions that I'm working under, and what I intend to do with their contribution. For example, if someone were to create a file that contained a history of the band, I would add it to the "text_files" directory, add it to the list of available files in the FAQ, and create a macro that will allow me to send people the file if they email a request to phish-archives. 2 Some of you may know me as the guy who answers mail to phish-archives. For those of you who are a bit more computer/internet aware, you may also know me as the keeper of a somewhat dismal archive site on the Brown mainframe. Both of these were essentially true up until a few days ago. As of this week I have moved the Phish-Archive site from the mainframe, which is really an awful place for an ftp site, to another machine here at Brown. I'm not giving out the address yet, because I'm having some problems getting anonymous ftp to work. It is only a matter of time, however, until the archive is moves to a much better machine for an archive site, a NeXT workstation. The new archive site will have a LOT of things that the old archive site did not. For one thing, most of the binary files: sounds, graphics, machine-specific documents, etc will be ftp-able from this machine; in that past I've had a lot of problems getting the files, but those problems will be gone when the new archive comes up. Another thing that many of you might find useful: The whole phish-net will be there. That is, every digest EVER sent out by fuggles will be online and readable, so essentially every article that has ever been posted to the net is stored at the archive. (See WAIS below). I also plan to keep a submissions directory, so that people can add things to the archive without a hassle; GIFs, sounds, etc. Eric Berman has recently taken over the editting of the Chords file and has created a really nice version that is in Word for Windows and Word for Mac 4.0/5.0 form; these will be on the ftp site. All the old Phish files: The Helping Phreindly Book, the lyrics phile, the tour information file, etc, etc, will also all be there. And who knows what else I may be able to fit onto this machine. All in all, the new archive will be several orders of magnitude better that the old one. Future plans for the archive site: As soon as I get anonymous ftp running I am going to register the site with Archie, the database of anonymous ftp sites on the internet. That way when someone wants to search for "phish", the real archive will show up, not some small machine with a few of the files that someone put up one after- noon. The next step is adding a Gopher server. For those of you who don't know what gopher is, imagine the entire internet acting like a disk, with the University of Minnesota as the home directory. As you change directories, you can find different kind of information, attach to different sites on the internet, etc. And it all is done seamlessly for you by Gopher. It's simply a great protocol and I encourage everyone to use it. Please mail me if you're interested. Anyway, I'm going to add a Gopehr server so that the Phish archive will be accessible via this new and much better method of navigating the internet. After that I'd like to run a WAIS server on the site as well. WAIS, or Wide Area Information Service (I think) is simply a way of indexing and searching information. For example, let's say that the phish-archive contains 786 digests (which it does, at the moment). Compressed, this is 8 megabytes of text. (I have no idea what it is in expanded form.) Now, without WAIS, how would you go about searching for a NYE setlist? You'd have to figure out which digest numbers came a few days after NYE, download those, and read them all to find the list. With WAIS and Gopher, or just a WAIS program for your machine, you can ask the WAIS server that's running on the archive to list for you all the digests that contain the phrase "NYE Setlist." WAIS will return the name of the file that contains that string (in this case that'll be the number of the digest) and the line in which it found the string, so you can differentiate between "Here's the NYE setlist" and "Does anybody have a NYE setlist?" The complexity of the search depends only on the complexity of your WAIS program; most Gopher programs have a limited interface to WAIS, and some WAIS-only programs exist that allow much more sophisticated searches. That's it for my future plans. If anyone has any suggestions, please send email to phish-archives@fuggles.acc.virginia.edu; that way I can save your suggestions in a convenient place and I won't lose them. Also, anyone who has any files that you might want to put on the site please also mail phish-archives and let me know. I'm happy to make space for you. I hope that the new archive site provides a funky new toy for everyone to play with, and I hope it gets a lot more use than the current archive site!! Closing Humor On 6/12/98, Josh Rude posted this fun parody (to be sung to the tune of "Guyute"): RMP's the little group I come to for the Phishy poop But usually I read some stuff With NPC, and find it tough To find a single bit of news That's Phish-related, so the blues Takes over me as I begin Playing my tapes I quietly spin There's spammers here, which do annoy Me 'midst the rumors I enjoy The fake set-lists, the trolls, the begs For the show that happened yesterday Me ponders with others the new Album which we hope we see soon And although bad lurks here, the good Seeps moreso through -- just as it should See also the Phish.Net's gift to Trey's daughter Eliza. Thanks also to Dan Mielcarz <Daniel.W.Mielcarz@Dartmouth.EDU>, Kim Hannula <hannula@panther.middlebury.edu>, Leonard Skagerberg <eugeneincer@hotmail.com>, Dan Seideman, and Brian Fisk <bfisk@www.phish.net>. rec.music.phish We Phish fans have our own Usenet newsgroup, called rec.music.phish. The newsgroup is the primary forum for Phish.Net discussion. While it is entirely unmoderated, please keep your posts relevant to Phish, their music, and other issues of interest for Phish fans. Likewise, please browse the Phish.Net FAQ (http://www.phish.net/PhishFAQ/) for information before bombarding the newsgroup with questions, or before breaking standard rules of netiquette. For information about accessing the newsgroup, contact your Internet service provider. You can also browse and post to rec.music.phish via DejaNews on the web (http://www.dejanews.com/). To post to rec.music.phish directly from your email box, send your message to rmp@www.phish.net, and it will automatically be forwarded to the newsgroup. Benjy's Digest Benjy's Digest, the followup to Rosemary's Digest was a low-volume, high content subset of the Usenet newsgroup rec.music.phish. Benjy Eisen, a volunteer Phish fan, read every post to rec.music.phish and picked the best and most relevant articles for the Digest. Benjy has moved on to other things; please read his farwell message. www.phish.net and the entire Phish community thank Benjy for his efforts at improving Phish discussion. The searchable archives of Benjy's Digest are still available. The tradition of Benjy's digest continues with the Phish.Net Digest. "Community cannot for long feed on itself; it can only flourish with the coming of others from beyond, their unknown and undiscovered brothers." -- Howard Thurman This page last updated June 01, 2009. All contents © 1992-2007 Ellis Godard. All rights reserved.