As many of you may have noticed, our front page today is sporting a radically different look. For those who weren't around with us back when we originally launched in October of 2002, the design you are looking at for our front page is the way the site looked exactly back then down to the advertisement promoting the upcoming release of Linkin Park's (then) newest album Meteora. We felt this would be a humorous, and even nostalgic way to look back on how far we've come and we hope that all of you enjoy our retro skin, which will be up the entire week of LPA's anniversary. To see this design, and other past designs feel free to head on over to our gallery linked below.

This week marks the tenth year as an operational Linkin Park fansite for the LPAssociation, which officially launched way back on October 24th, 2002! In commemoration of this huge achievement we will be celebrating all week long starting today, right here on the website! We've had a lot of fun over the years and have definitely built some great memories and highlights over the last decade and this is all thanks to our very dedicated and loyal community, some of which have been around since the very beginning! Without our visitors, this site would never have achieved such ambitious standards and it's thanks to you guys that we're able to celebrate our tenth birthday as a website.

Beginning today we will be kicking off our landmark birthday week by launching the "LPAssociation 10th Anniversary Celebrations!" forum, which will be accessible from the main forums index and open to everyone! This will be the central celebratory party hub for all the activities, contests and events we'll have going on over the next few days and we'd love to see you guys getting involved and posting with us! There will be a lot of fun, community events and chances to win prizes over the coming days and whether you're a veteran LPA member from the early days or a newbie from recent years, we hope you'll stop by and join in! Along with a site design flashback, username changes, new LPA10 merchandise and a discount across our whole store, below you can check out just some of the things we have planned for this coming week!
Along with all our planned activities you can expect a lot of easter eggs and homages to years past as we make reference to our earlier days as a website and the community that built it. I also want to remind you that the "LPAssociation 10th Anniversary Celebrations!" forum is open to everyone! So please stop by and create your own threads about any funny or nostalgic memories you have from your time here, we'd love to read them! Thanks for reading guys and I hope to see you join us in celebrating ten years of the LPA!

As part of our ongoing anniversary celebrations, we have added a special collection of Limited Edition 10th Anniversary Merchandise to our Spreadshirt store to commemorate 10 years of service as a Linkin Park fansite!

For a short time only you can receive 15% off of your entire order just by using coupon code ANNIVERSARY at checkout (code expires October 24th). Consider this as a "Thank You" to our members for their wonderful support over the years!

Lastly, with the purchase of any product, you will receive VIP status on our forums, which includes a custom LPA VIP banner and username colour. Simply contact us and provide proof of your purchase and we'll grant you VIP status shortly thereafter!

As many of our visitors may already know from this earlier post, 2012 is what we consider to be our official 10th year of operation as a fansite. As the story goes, myself and my best friend Omar founded this website together in 2001, spending months of intense research (while downloading music videos on a 56k connection to get screenshots!) to officially open the site back in April 2002 as an Angelfire site. With only a fraction of what we see now; and with two staff members on board, Omar and I (at age 15) set a few somewhat unrealistic goals. I wanted us to one day become the largest and #1 Linkin Park fan-site in the world, and to be noticed by the band, and Omar wanted to reach 1 million hits. When he told me that, I thought he was crazy. Mind you my goal wasn't any less insane, but I had been involved in a few websites prior to LPA and none of them had ever reached a million hits. To me 1 million hits [back in 2002 before the true .com boom] was as unachievable as winning the lottery. It just didn't happen easily, and most tinier websites of the time never knew what it's like to accomplish that much traffic in a single month.

But we had dreams, and with those dreams we pushed hard to make The LPA the best website that it could be launching in April 2002. Within two months we got a lucky break and scored the world exclusive leaks of Enth E Nd, Wth>You and P5hing Me Aw@y which brought us 4,000 hits in a month. Looking back now, it's actually kind of funny how we both reacted. At the time, to us 4,000 hits was a huge milestone. Being young and naive, we thought 4,000 hits was unbelievably huge (Google gets that probably in ten seconds). We felt like we were in the big leagues, which made what came later even harder to believe. About a month later, former staff member Alex came on board and bought us the .com domain you are currently viewing the site on. We never had owned a .com before, and me and Omar were giddy with excitement. We worked hard with Alex to redesign the site entirely, gathering over 1,500 photos, and buying our first ever forums on Invision Power Board, all in time for the site's grand reopening in October 2002. By January 2003, Omar had got his wish. The LPA had achieved well over a million hits, going on to have (for us) an unfathomable 35 Million Hits in one year by the time we got to December of 2003.

It was amazing to think about then, and even now. To think, here we were, two 16 year old kids who had never been a part of anything really special, didn't hang out with the popular crowds, and now we had 35 million hits in a year. It was the highest point of our young lives at the time, and we both couldn't believe that we were finally experiencing the traffic of our idols PushMeAway (now defunct) and LPAlliance (also defunct).

But for us it was only just the beginning.

In the years that followed, all of our formerly unrealistic dreams and ambitions would be accomplished. Staff members came and went. The site went through multiple changes, and as for my unrealistic wish? Well, LPA got that shoutout and more in 2006 when we scored the first ever fansite interview with a band member; interviewing bassist Dave "Phoenix" Farrell in anticipation of Minutes To Midnight. An interview with Joe would follow a year later, with a joint fansite interview happening with Chester in 2009. Traffic records were broken, and our member base grew, to the point where we are one of the most respected Linkin Park fansites on the web today. And it was all made possible by Linkin Park's absolutely incredible and passionate fanbase.

Going into 2012 I was already proud of everything this site had accomplished to date. A Thousand Suns was a record breaking album cycle for the site, and I really didn't believe we could do any better than that. I was wrong. What you the fans have accomplished for us in just the first part of this year would be almost impossible to believe, if we didn't see it for ourselves in our server statistics.

From January 18th, 2012 (The posting of the "Mix Of Old And New" Kerrang Scans - First New Album Article) until now, our site has accomplished the following:

104,042,984 Hits
1,401,409 Visitors
1,370 New Users
84,757 New Posts (13k of those coming from just two news threads)
1,716 New Threads

May 2012 Hits: 29,312,735
June 2012 Hits: 35,159,749 (NEW RECORD!)

To put things into perspective for those who don't work with numbers or aren't good with web statistics, the LPA has accomplished a total of 10,283 registered members over a period of 10 years (as of the date of this post). Almost 15% of our overall userbase has registered in just the last 6 months. When this year began we were almost 90 thousand posts away from a million posts. Five months later, and we only need to have approx 1,400 more posts to reach a milestone that upon opening these forums in July 2002, seemed practically impossible and something we'd never accomplish.

In addition to that, we've had several amazing things happen for us this album cycle. Most notably was Mike Shinoda himself approaching us to write not one but two articles for his blog, and LPA Admin Joe having obtained the rights to leak LIES GREED MISERY in FLAC/MP3 on LPAssociation.com. The amount of support that the band and Mike have shown us this album cycle in their social media accounts/blogs/official site and even in interviews is something we cannot begin to properly express our gratitude for. Running the LPA has been in many ways a labor of love, and a commitment towards the over 40 million Linkin Park fans worldwide, who continue to amaze us with their dedication to the band and even in some cases to the site itself. Your support has given us a renewed energy to continue to make the LPA the best it can be, and we cannot thank you enough.

With LPA already having accomplished it's best year ever in 2012, and 6 whole months left before 2012 comes to a close, we cannot wait to see what happens in the months ahead and we look forward to sharing this experience with every one of you. This August, LPA staff members Joe, Todd, and Myself [as well as many LPA regulars] will be on hand at the Summit to show our support for the band and represent the LPA. We look forward to meeting many of you there, and on behalf of the entire staff currently working for the site: Thank you to the band, Adam Ruehmer, Jessica Sklar, LPUHQ, and the fans for your unwavering support. We look forward to continuing to provide you all with the best in LP news/information in the years to come.

-Derek, Joe, Todd, Mark, Louis, Luke, Ree, Benjamin, and Jeff

Also thank you to Omar, Andrea, Anthony, Alex, Gary, Bryan, Ander, Keaton, Nikki and all of the other staff members who are currently no longer staff but helped contribute to the journey so far. We appreciate everything you did to get us to where we are today.

View A Timeline Of Our Acheivements So Far

View LPA Versions 1 through 4

Attention All Members/Visitors To The LPA,

As many of you may have noticed over the last two to three weeks, we here at the LPA have been experiencing severe difficulties with our server that has lead to frequent downtimes that sometimes make the site inaccessible for periods of 10 minutes up to a full hour. These issues have been of high concern to us, and we have tried numerous free alternatives (server tweaks, CloudFlare etc) to see if we could resolve the situation without incurring any more costs on our end.

Unfortunately it has become extremely apparent in the last couple of days that such an option is no longer viable. Our website has grown in traffic substantially the last couple of months (setting records in the process) and our server, as great as it may be, has found it's resources repeatedly exhausted to the breaking point on more than one occasion. Unfortunately, being people who still owe college debt and work regular paying jobs, LPA's costs are beginning to become excessive which makes upgrading our servers difficult due to prior financial obligations. The current hosting bill is approximately 109.00 a month, and any upgrade is going to see that price jump into the 150-200's if not possibly more depending on what we need to withstand the traffic.

This is where we require your help, as such a jump in monthly costs will prove to be difficult for us to take on in addition to what we already pay out of pocket. As of this time, due to the size of the site we are left with no other choice but to upgrade and ask you our valuable members for donations. We understand that many of you also have your own financial worries to be concerned about, and donating out of pocket is not financially viable for some of you, but for those of you who can help, it would go a long way towards making sure we provide you with same quality website, with a lot less of the downtimes.

There is no minimum limit for donations that we ask for. Anything can help. Even if you can only donate 5 dollars out of pocket, 20 of you donating 5.00 monthly would mean we would have an extra 100.00 towards hosting which would more than cover the costs needed to keep running smoothly. A little bit goes a long way, and we appreciate anything you guys can do to help. Starting later this week, we will be putting a "donations so far this month" tab which will help you guys track how much we need that month to cover our higher hosting costs. Thank you in advance for any help you can give. You may all donate through the link in my signature if you so desire.

Thank You,
LPA Staff

Greetings LPA Members,
Thank you for your patience earlier today as we worked hard to fix the database issues that plagued our forums for the better part of the day. A corruption of the forum "search" table in the database lead to our forums suffering a fatal error, and as a result, certain forum databases were not updating, and other parts of the forums were virtually inaccessible from early this morning until only a few hours ago. While your posts still went through (and no information was lost), many of you were greeted with errors upon trying to reply to a thread, and some even were unable to read new posts as vBulletin was not registering the replies in the threads. We understand how frustrating these issues (and the server related downtimes) have been for you, and we want to thank you for the amazing show of respect, love, patience and support that you have given us over the past few days.

While completely avoiding downtimes is almost impossible, as we cannot afford to buy a corporate level server or "scaling" servers (300 dollars and up a month), we have recently installed server optimization software (CloudFlare) that we hope will greatly limit site crashes, or at least prolong the amount of time it takes until the site goes down. So far the results have been promising. In the 72 hours since the server optimization software was installed our website has endured close to 2.5 million hits, and has stayed up the entire time throughout the extreme traffic. While some people encountered forum glitches today, those issues were unrelated to the server (and instead completely on vBulletin's end) and we are cautiously optimistic that the days of 1-2 hour long downtimes may be (for the most part) behind us.

Only time will tell. In the meantime, if you wish to donate to us to help with us purchasing upgrades to help the site, you may do so through the donate link in my forum signature.

Thanks for your understanding. We are so thankful for your support!

-LPA Staff

In recent weeks we've seen a number of signatures that are unnecessarily long on our forums. With the emergence of smaller notebooks, tablets, and mobile browsing, these images take up large portions of their screens. These large images also affect page load times, putting further strain on our servers, which will be put to the test over the next few months as Linkin Park's new album news cycle ramps up in intensity.

Therefore we will commence enforcing a new policy that asks all members to keep their signatures (photo and text inclusive) to no more than 400 pixels (1.33 inches) tall. If your current signature is in violation of this new policy, please alter it accordingly.

Remember: The most important part of your post should be the message content itself!

Thanks very much,
LPA Staff

Good news mobile visitors! We've made some adjustments to the site that we feel will make your LPA experience a lot more enjoyable:

- Mobile Enabled Main Site

With the LPA design being very graphically intensive, it may be hard for some people to properly load our website on less capable smartphones (Blackberries), or in areas where 3G or 4G data speeds are not available. Because of this, we have created a stripped mobile version of our main site that will auto-launch on any internet enabled Smartphone. Launched back with LPA 4.0 in February 2010, this mobile skin possess most of the content already available on our full site (News, Site Updates, Lyrics, and Tour Dates), but provides a quick and convenient way to access Linkin Park related news and information without needing access to a desktop or laptop computer. As always, people who wish to view the site normally on their phone may click on "Full Site" however be warned, not all features may work properly on your smartphone. Also, this feature has been known to not work on iPads and Android tablets, as those tablets are powerful enough to load the main site and will not require the mobile skin.

- Mobile Forum Skin

While many members can already use our current default forum skin without any difficulty on their mobile, we have decided to still provide an option of a sleek mobile only skin available for those who would like to post on the LPA quickly without long load times or the added bells and whistles of the regular forum skin. By choosing "Mobile Style" in the skin selection menu, your phone will automatically be redirected to the mobile version of our boards. The option to edit posts and quote posts currently does not exist in the mobile skin but as vBulletin upgrades their Mobile Style, we hope to present this option to you in the future. The shoutbox also does not exist in the Mobile Style, but much like with the main site, clicking on "Full Site" will allow you to use the full skin if you so desire and thus the shoutbox as well. However; keep in mind the "full site" feature may not work on all phones, so please only use the Mobile Style if you feel the regular skin loads too slow.

-Tapatalk

As many of you have noticed via the prompt that comes up the first time you visit our forums on a smartphone, we now have integration with Tapatalk. Many of our users have used Tapatalk with the LPA and enjoyed it greatly. You can find out more about it at http://www.tapatalk.com .

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As always, thanks for visiting The Linkin Park Association and feel free to let us know of any suggestions you may have!

Hello All,
As most of you may have already noticed by looking at our forum homepage, we are now sporting a brand new "Facebook Connect" icon which will allow you to link your Facebook profile to your LPAssociation Forums account.

Through linking your profile to LPAssociation, you will be able to instantly transfer your location, interests, bio and occupation from Facebook to your LPA member profile, as well as share content instantly from our website to your "Wall" to pass it on to your friends.

To share threads/replies: simply click "Like" at the top of a thread to share it on your "Wall", or click "Publish to Facebook" when replying/starting a new thread to inform people of a new post you have made on the LPAssociation Forums.

We hope you find this new addition fun, and feel free to contact us with any questions/feedback/suggestions that you may have. Enjoy .

As part of our ongoing efforts to better serve you our valued visitors, we have made several new changes our Main Navigation. Below are the list of changes:

• LPA Media: Don't worry, the gallery has gone nowhere! In order to better serve you our visitors, we have combined both the Downloads and Gallery menu choices into one big Media category to make both easier to find.
• "Connect" becomes LPA: Rather than separate the LPA section and Connect, our Facebook, Twitter, Last.Fm, Youtube and Site History can now be found under the "LPA" section. This was done to conserve space and allow us to add two new menu sections which are:
• LPA Store - Show your support for the LPA by purchasing one of our many shirt designs through our official online store. All proceeds go towards making the site better, and improving the experience for YOU our valued visitors.
• LPA Wiki - The Linkin Park Wiki is a collaborative project between The Linkin Park Association and the Linkin Park fan community to bring together fans across the globe and create the most comprehensive and in-depth Linkin Park resource on the internet. With this wiki we intend to create the ultimate Linkin Park "listeners guide", a place for new and and old fans alike to find all the information they need with just a simple click of the mouse.

We hope you enjoy and understand these new changes, and we look forward to unveiling even more new updates within the upcoming months. Thank you for your support!

More LPA News

• Gallery Updates 03/03/2011
• If LPA Made A T-Shirt...
• Newly Revised Forum Changes
• LP Fans: We Need YOUR Help!
• Respecting Other People
• Attention: New Policy Concerning Trolls
• Linkin Park Tour Article Posted in Gallery
• A Thousand Suns Forum Theme Now Available!
• New Contributor Added To The Site!
• A Personal Thank You To All Of Our New/Existing Members And Guests!