The Army Rumour Service

The Army Rumour Service (ARRSE) is an unofficial British Army website and forum. Known colloquially as ARRSE - from "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 has been quoted by the mainstream news in the national press;, mentioned in a debate on service voting in the House of Lords; and supporter of various charities.

Aims
The aim of the website 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.

Sections
The site is divided into several sections


 * Forums
 * An image gallery
 * Chat rooms
 * An Instant Message facility.
 * A Military equipment online shop
 * A list of members
 * The ARRSEPedia.  A somewhat irreverent military encyclopedia using Mediawiki. In their own words "The content is humorous, serious, sensible, stupid, decent and just occasionally a touch offensive."

History
ARRSE came into being in January 2002 started by a couple of army officers after a drunken discussion in a Salisbury pub. The original concept was "borrowed" from the Professional Pilots Rumour Network (PPRuNe) where some of the early site users frequented the "Military Pilots" forum. At the time there was no single outlet for army discusion except for a couple of boards started up by former students of the (then) Army 6th Form College. To begin with, the top brass in the army and MoD were not happy with an outlet that they couldn't control and tried to compete with ARRSE by setting up an official site that over time became the current ArmyNet. The fact that users were not afforded any anonymity on the official site meant that ARRSE flourished, especially after the press began to use it as a source of easily obtainable quotes. Around 2007, a holding company called OliveNet was formed to manage ARRSE and the other spin off sites Rum Ration and Rear Party. The RAF forum eGoat is entirely unconnected with any of the OliveNet sites.

The site is run by one of the founders and a team of volunteer moderators with experience or expertise in the areas that the forum covers.

The site was originally created using MS Frontpage. It soon became apparent that this was not 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 up a nightmare.

The next upgrade to the site in saw it move to a basic 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

The site underwent a major overhaul in September 2010 with many of the forums being rationalised into groups so that the page refresh rate was significantly increased.