The Army Rumour Service

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

**ARRSE**
ARRSE's main page
URL	http://www.arrse.co.uk/cpgn2/index.php
Commercial?	Yes
Type of site	Community
Registration	Free
Owner	The COs
Created by	The COs

The Army Rumour Service (ARRSE) is an unofficial British Army website & forum. Known colloquially as ARRSE - a moniker derived from the British ARmy Rumour SErvice - the site styles itself as the unofficial voice of the British Army. It gets more than 5 million page hits per month; is regularly mentioned and quoted [1] in the national press [2]; a significant contributor to a debate on service voting in the House of Lords [3]; supporter of various charities [4] and read by the full spectrum of the British Army from the most junior to extremely senior.

1 The Official View and the Concept
2 Aims
3 Sections
4 History
5 External links

[edit] The Official View and the Concept

The site has never had any official communication with the Ministry of Defence. Reactions have been mixed to the sudden limelight given by the web presence and open discussion as this was obviously completely new to a traditional and by nature cautious organisation. The site was certainly the first time the British Forces had a high profile web presence. The success of the site has led to it doubling in size every 8 months or so. The content is interesting - despite the inevitable soldiers' griping (all soldiers complain - it's almost a duty) the site certainly illustrates a huge pride and interest in the British Army. The chance to voice these feelings publicly and in a slightly 'rebellious' way, was and is very attractive.

[edit] Aims

The aim of ARRSE (in so far that it has one) is to provide a useful, informative and amusing site for people with an interest in the British Army. Users can expect to find both reasoned argument and general chatter within the site. The 'official' version of ARRSE is called ArmyNet, which is a secure site open only to authorised and entitled members of the British Army.

[edit] Sections

The site is divided into several sections

Forums
A gallery
Chat rooms
An Instant Message facility.
A Military equipment shop
A list of members
The ARRSEPedia. A somewhat irrerevant military encyclopedia using Mediawiki.

[edit] History

ARRSE came into being in January 2002 and was created using MS Frontpage. It soon became apparent that this wasn't up to the task and this was soon replaced by YaBB (Yet Another Bulletin Board). This was a significant improvement and supported the rapid expansion of the site. Unfortunately it was based on a flat file structure which created vast numbers of individual files that soon made backing the site up a nightmare.

The next upgrade to the site in saw it move to a fully fledged Content Management System named PHP-Nuke. This operated on a Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP system and gave a significant improvement in functionality, reliability and speed. Unfortunately PHPNuke also had a reputation for poor security and this led to the site being hacked by some Brazilian hackers in May 2004. After almost a week of downtime the site was restored and since then security has been the number one priority of the site administrators. The drive for increased security led to a further change of software to CPGNuke, an offshoot of PHPNuke.

The latest version of ARRSE operates using DragonflyCMS version 9.6.1 and also uses the following Open Source projects for other parts of the site:

Media Wiki
OTRS Ticket Response System
SQL-Ledger Accountancy Software

[edit] External links

The ARRSE site
Rear Party - the site for spouses, partners and 'significant others' of serving British servicemen and women
Rum Ration - the sister site to ARRSE for members of the Royal Navy and Royal Marines
ArmyNET - the British Army's official secure online information exchange service
E Goat - the RAF's unofficial online community