A Message from Dear Leader on the Return of the Glorious PRF. All Hail Dear Leader!

A Message from Dear Leader on the Return of the Glorious PRF. All Hail Dear Leader!

1 by akosinski

We have revived the Electrical Audio Forums, also known to those in the know as the Premier Rock Forum or PRF.

At the end of 2019 and beginning of 2020, the original Electrical Audio website and forums were plagued by a barrage of spam and malware bots, some of which succeeded in corrupting databases and crippling the utility of the site. We took the forums and website offline to rebuild them. The website went live in mid-2020 and has been undergoing gradual improvement ever since, but the forums took a lot longer to get going.

When the forums were taken offline, a backup copy of the forum data was requested, to use as an archive and to repopulate the eventual new-edition forums. On cursory examination of that backup, it appeared to be complete, and the hosting company wiped the original forum data off the server. When work began on reviving the forum however, it became clear that only a fraction of the original data had been preserved. That meant that the old forums couldn't just be revived, as many threads. posts and links were broken or missing.

Thanks to our OG web Sensei, Russ Arbuthnot (FM Pavaveda), there was a complete backup of the forum from 2008, and with that and the usable portion of the backup from 2020 our new Forum Rabbi FM andteater pieced together a usable, though incomplete archive of the old forums. A lot got lost, and unfortunately what's lost is lost forever, but what's there is still a wealth of knowledge, humor and kindness, so we wanted to keep it available. Many images were hosted on sites that no longer exist or where permissions have expired, so there are big gaps in threads, but what survives is better than nothing. These old threads appear in the Archive.

If you were a registered user in the old forums, your posts will appear in the Archive, but your user name will appear as (username)_Archive. The new forums have not been populated with users, so all those old user names are available again. You can create a user profile with your old user name or pick a new one.

The Archive forum threads are locked, but searchable and linkable, so feel free to link to those posts in the new forums to restart discussion. FM Andteater has made a helpful video to show you how to revive a post or thread from the Archive into the Forums. View it here: viewtopic.php?f=25&t=69034

Some FMs have contacted us about deleting old posts, and unfortunately we have no way of knowing if the backups include posts of yours you or we had previously deleted. You can't delete things of yours from the Archive, only current forum posts, so if you find something you_Archive wrote that you want us to delete, or if you spot something else we missed that shouldn't be there, please let us know (send a private message to "akosinski") and we'll clean it up.

We are doing our best to keep the bots at bay, and unfortunately that will mean you, forum member, will need to authenticate yourself when you create your account, and occasionally perform a captcha stunt when you log in. We realize this is a nuisance, but after researching it for a while, there doesn't seem to be a better way to keep the bots out than asking them to identify boats or trees.

So Welcome back, dive in. Hit FM greg up in the Tech Room, crap something in Crap/Not Crap, share a story, start an epic adventure, rank, kvetch and crapass. Knock yourselves out. Abusive behavior, spamming and trolling will get you booted and your shit deleted.

-EA staff.