Fruhead.Com FAQ

This is a hard question to answer. It's a community of Fruheads, or fans of the band Moxy Fruvous. It's a place to hang out and get to know fellow Fruheads, and interact in a million ways.

FHDC = FruHead Dot Com, just the short name for this site.

No. The official band website is Fruvous.Com (aka FDC), run by the magical hands of Chris O'Malley. It is the official source for Fruvous news and updates. I will post news and tour dates on this site as well, but the end-all source for this information is FDC.

You do. This site works because you, the Fruheads, are such a cool group and have a great community and have made this site possible. If you asking who the techie who writes the code for this site, that's Josh Woodward.

The short answer is you don't. You can browse most of the site without ever needing to log on. However, if you want to participate in the action, you need to have an identity. Also, to protect e-mail addresses from spamming, you must be logged in to view peoples' profiles. Fill out a quick form and validate your email address, then you're on your way. It's free and it's easy.

Never. You have the option to receive site updates via email, these will be very infrequent, and you can easily opt out of them. Since users must be logged on to see your profile, spambots can't use this site to harvest your email address. And obviously I will never sell your user information.

The original FHDC was a Perl application that I wrote in a very haphazard, FHDC-specific way. I wanted to create other communities from the same code, but found it hard because nothing was generic. I started the Entropy Project to address this. It was rewritten entirely from scratch in PHP with an eye towards modularity and generality. The project is open source, and I hope to have a release version by Fall 2002.

FHDC is, and always will be, ad-free. There's no sense in making pages slow and ugly to put a couple bucks in my pocket. Enjoy one of the last ad-free sites on the net. :-) The one slight exception to this is under the music picks, where I link in an affiliate Amazon banner for the band you're viewing. This makes it easy to find music from the bands, and it gives me a cut of the booty if you buy from my links. :-)

We opened our doors on August 10, 1999.

In order to make sure everyone knows what is acceptable on this site and what is not, an acceptable use policy was created. It's fairly basic stuff, but please be familiar with it.

FHDC started as a simple community site to chat on. I ended up setting my browser front page to FHDC, so I added a couple features like bookmarks and homepages. Eventually, purely out of selfish motives, a lot of non-Fruhead-specific features evolved. I wanted to do 90% of the stuff I do online through FHDC. Eventually it mutated into the monster it is today. So the short answer: FHDC has more than you'll ever need, so use what you want and ignore the rest. :-)

This was a feature in the original Fruhead.Com. Once when I switched providers, I lost the ability to add aliases in realtime, so I took the feature down. Only people who signed up back in the day still have their aliases. I hope to add this feature again in the future.

You have two options, try another theme, or create a one-column page.

Your account starts with a default set of front-page modules in certain spots. You can control what you see and where, however. Just go here and tweak to your heart's content. You can even create other custom pages from this.

When you sign up for an account, you have the option of giving your birthday. If you do, others can sign a card for you on the day before your birthday. You will receive the card by e-mail on your birthday. If you don't want to participate in this, you can clear the birthday out of your profile.

The wall is what I like to call a "drive-by chatting". It's an ongoing structureless discussion. You can chat on the wall from the front page, or if you're really hardcore, you can use the PowerWall interface. There are two types of PowerWalls, the streaming (the best kind, if your browser supports it), and the refreshing. Choose which one you prefer in the wall options screen.

They work much like you'd expect from sites like Diaryland, Blogger, etc. You create your diary as a standard journal or a weblog, and add stuff. You're in complete control of the templates. Why would you want to host your diary here? Why not? :-)

You can create a free homepage for yourself on Fruhead.Com. Not only are the pages ad-free, you get a cool feature that no other free homepage provider supports: versioning. I use it a lot to transfer files from home to work. You get 5 megs of storage, if you need more, just ask.

This is another thing I added because I wanted it. It's a central place to put your notes about anything. For instance, I have a note category devoted to song lyrics. I have folders for my original songs and for covers, grouped by artist. I also have a recipe archive. This is a very cool feature if you take some time with it. You can even elect to share your notes with the world.

Even on a community as cool as FHDC, it attracts a certain number of trolls whose only mission is to make an ass out of themselves or someone else on the site. Historically, I just nuked the worst offenders, but I hated doing that because it felt like I was playing Hitler or something. So I appointed a group of 20ish people to do the dirty work for me. :-) When someone is a jackass, moderators can vote to put a user on "timeout". They are then banned from the site for a certain amount of time.

The closest thing to this is the AMMF FAQ. It's a little out of date, but it has a lot of great information. This FAQ will not cover much in the way of Fruvous factoids, so be sure to check out the AMMF FAQ.

Moxy Fruvous has been on a touring hiatus since 2000. This means that they are still a band, but are taking a break from the road. They're using this time to recover from their relentless touring of the 90's, and to persue solo projects. .David Matheson has released a wonderful solo CD. Jian Ghomeshi released a solo EP and is working on a full CD while juggling a TV show for CBC and managing Martina Sobara, Murray Foster is playing with the Lesters, and Mike Ford is working on children's music. I don't have any information on if and when the band will regroup.

Yes, the guys know about the site and have visited it on occasion. They've even given occasional plugs to the site during concerts in the past.

Obviously, check out Fruvous.Com for all your Fruneeds. There are also sites devoted to Dave, Jian and Murray (what happened to Mike's site?). There used to be a newsgroup and an IRC channel for Fruvous, but those have mostly faded away.

It's Delaware.