FRN

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As of the Ides of March 2011, the FRN was observing its annual hiatus/holiday, "FRN Annual Domain Expiration Day."

The Free Radio Network (FRN) is a now defunct website once popular with pirate radio DXers and broadcasters, prior to 2007. Most of the activity took place in the Message Board, which was broken down into several sub-boards. The most active of these boards was "The Grapevine Pirate Shortwave", featuring general discussion of pirate radio, and "The A*C*E* Loggings" which is where loggings were posted.

Site popularity began to notably decline around 2007, when the administrator of the site, Pat Murphy, began refusing new site user registrations except in special cases where he could be certain of their personal identity. Around this time, HFU, with a liberal registration policy, began to attract a more substantial user base, and not requiring substantial personal details.

In early 2011, it was revealed that many of the user accounts of the FRN were actually a sockpuppet of Commander Bunny. These accounts included Beans, Thumper, and Mosby. Once this became widely known in the free radio community, Commander Bunny was forced to stop using these accounts. Many of the message threads containing posts by these sockpuppets have since been deleted, in an attempt to destroy the evidence. The Radio Paranoia blog has preserved screen copies of some of these threads.

As of May 25, 2011, the FRN was only intermittently available after a deadly tornado on May 22 struck Joplin, Missouri, where the website's server was hosted. Site owner John Cruzan confirmed by May 23 that he and his family in the Joplin area were not injured.

In the latter part of August, 2011, the FRN disappeared from the DNS (Domain Name Server). This was several days prior to Hurricane Irene striking the US, so the two appear to be unrelated.

In the spring of 2013, the FRN apparently became completely defunct and went offline, at a time when there was virtually no meaningful activity on the site.

See also



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