This remnant will be replaced soon. The FAQ is back, with a new design! HEADERHERE... Questions and Answers about... VETERANS: what can I do to help? Last updated: January 24 Lots. The most help is, of course, taping the shows, and we all owe a *huge* bit of gratitude to anyone who goes to the trouble and expense of bringing home crispy tapes for others to eventually enjoy. Tapers are the guiding light of phans and the net. The second-best thing you can do is run tape trees on the net. This can get lots of high-quality, low gen tapes out to lots of people and spread the tunes out faster and wider. The most frequent thing you can do is answer newbie questions (off the net please, through personal mail) about phish, their music, specific songs, the net and netiquette, tapes, taping, etc. In many cases, you could just refer them to this FAQ file, but it wouldn't hurt to also offer brief answers. Takes more time and effort to be mean than it does to be really nice, and mean people suck. Save your flames and curtness for where it's deserved and help a new netter find some cool tunes, if not from you then maybe because you answered a few dumb questions. The most face-to-face thing you can do is to organize a local Tapers' Alliance. There are a handful of these around the country. Some are solely for those who tape shows live in the audience; others are for anyone interested in trading bootlegs. Some are solely about or are focused on Phish; others embrace tapes of live performances generally. Some meet semiannually at a potluck and set up 10 or 15 decks at once; others get together biweekly or monthly and swap blanks and newly dubbed tapes. All you need to do to start is: decide how often you want to get together, decide what area you're covering, decide where you can meet the first time and what you want to do (BYODeck potlucks are great), and post the net looking for interested folk. You may not want to put directions and all onto a public forum; reserve them for private communications. However formal or informal, as an organization or just a single event, regular or temporary they are, they can be great. Lemuria located 40 tapers within his city limits and hosted a few bashes, with as many as 20 folks; you should try it. One idea in the works (by Bill Drury <bild@io.com>) is a Tape Trading Machine, but it hasn't come to pass yet. "Once, in the wilds of Afghanistan, somebody lost the corkscrew and for days we were forced to live on nothing but food and water."" -- W.C. Fields" This page last updated January 24, 2007. All contents © 1992-2007 Ellis Godard. All rights reserved.