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 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 : 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 .