Brock the badger wrote:
seems a bit negative about the free party scene at the mo.
if all these folks are asking for contacts does this mean that party lines on Urban 75 (united systems etc) are on clampdown 2?
Those partylines are out of date and have not been used for ages. Southern partylines are now usually spread through word of mouth or getting to know people in person. there is a reason for the “paranoia” in recent times. It mostly relates to the South and East of England but a large proportion of our users are still from those regions.
Take a look at our forum from 2002-2004 onwards and you will see loads of party posts with locations, partylines, crew names in them and also detailed reviews of parties. Exactly the same happened on SJ, Kacchina and all the other party forums around that time (most of which apart from PV and SJ have folded)
Everything went so well, crews got complacent, overdid certain areas, put larger and larger rigs into them, partied for too long and didn’t clear up and caused more complaints. That led to the first wave of clampdowns and is why there are virtually no parties in some parts of SE England and those what remain are done by fairly “secretive” crews.
Its not a case of being overly paranoid of new users (99% of them are here in good faith) but simply being careful what you post about what many normal people deem to be a crime.
The cops may come across as more lenient than the man in the street and are still lenient in some areas but only because they don’t always have resources to close down every party.
they get complaints from public that they are “not doing enough”, this is why Norfolk went to acceptance to zero tolerance in just a few months, and Suffolk/Essex locked down a few years ago The same happened in Thames Valley a few years back.
These two areas represent the bulk of the rave locations for a lot of Southern England, which is why things look bad. Its a whole quarter of the country…
Its like the gary boys who post videos of themselves speeding on YT or others posting footage of crime/anti social behaviour. Most of them and their mates get trouble because someone simply sees the stuff on line and cuts and pastes the link in an email to the cops – they do have a lot more IT-literate coppers these days.
That goes for any public internet forum. We have lost some of our free speech because we shouted too loud in the past and at the moment little can be done about it. In some areas even putting legal events on here gets the events checked out by feds due to “possible links with illegal raves”.
Use this place to meet people, find out about legal events, chat about rigs , computers and other stuff and exchange music – but if you want to chat detailed stuff about parties you are better off on MSN or mobile phones or private messages.
The cops need a lot more paperwork to get at those things (a Court Order as opposed to just scanning a forum) and normally will only do so if people are involved in other crime such as drug dealing or theft.
