In order to address any questions in the future, I have put this page in place. Many people are confused or mislead as to the history of the river, I would like to clear that up here.

The "original" chat, named "The Holy River" was located on the Love4OneAnother server, which was then Prince's (symbol) official website. There was a cloud design and it utilized a free chat applet provided by SPiN. There was no administration or organization, which initially seemed like a good idea - the honor system - but soon proved to be too tempting for those with differing principles.

We quickly formed as a community of like minded, yet incredibly diverse people with one common thread - a love for Prince's musical career. Saying that, however, does not mean that a love, like, or even interest in Prince is a requirement of our community. Our community became tight knit based upon our "credo" and common beliefs. We were truly a "fish bowl" of individuality learning to swim within our world of diversity.

Through these connections, we agreed to create a website dedicated to our community highlighting the various chatters within. That was the "birth" of the river - shores. We started out on Geocities with just a few megs, and quickly needed more and more space to house the many pages.

Being located on a free, international server where our channel could be located in a list, we started encountering many problems with other personalities who desired to disrupt our "flow". There were problems with flooding, spamming, scrolling, and all out nastiness. Since the server wasn't connected to L41A, they had no administrative control - but through time I had gotten to know the owner and some of the moderators of the SPiN server and had already started working on solutions with them. Because we were such a staple community, they offered for us to become a permanent, moderated chat and I was "elected" as the Administrator of that chat.

Meanwhile, people understandably upset about all of the disruptions were contacting L41A to complain about all of the goings on. Again, having no administrative control - L4's hands were tied. My understanding is that their inbox was getting filled with complaints and they were frustrated and it came to me through sources that they were considering dropping the chat altogether.

At this time, I had started my own site for web design and had ample server space... I had already moved the shores to that server - and we had a "town meeting" to discuss the future of the river. I promised everyone that if they wanted, and if L4 dropped the site, I would happily host the site seamlessly so that we wouldn't lose our community. I made it clear that I wasn't interested in challenging L4 or becoming adversarial with them - but if they felt the need to discontinue their involvement in the chat, I would pick up the ball.

Everyone was relieved and agreed that the primary motivation was to maintain the affiliation with L41A, but, we were prepared to continue without said affiliation. After a lot of meetings and discussions, I was told via a messenger that I should prepare to take over the river 100% and that L4 had in fact made the decision to drop the chat as they were looking in other directions for their site.

The rest is pretty self-explanatory. The river existed on the shores on my server, and we thrived for a long time after. For reasons I won't go into here at this time, we slowly faded out (but never disappeared) and it was decided that it was for the best at the time for the river to be idle and at peace for a while. The channel still exists on SPiN - however, for our own reasons we won't be using that software anymore.

This is a new beginning for us - time to do the work and resume the beautiful connections that have made the river nearly legendary!

Angel Kisses & Smiles,
Star
^i^