Official Parker Guitars Website and Forum

[vjmanzo]

To my fellow Parker Guitar weirdos:

It looks like the official Parker Guitars website and forum are now offline as well as the website for the parent company U.S. Music Corp.

It's unknown if/when the official sites will return, but, regardless, we can continue the discussions about mods, maintenance, and all things Parker on this site:
http://flyclone.com

This forum is part of an effort being conducted in my self-sustaining, non-profit research lab connected with my university where I'm tenured, so it's not going anywhere any time soon.

@Patzag has agreed to resume his role as an administrator on this forum (thanks!), so: let the band play on!

[Patzag]

If you have direct lines to Parker fans who were on the now-apparently-defunct Parker forum, please let them know that we have a place to meet here!

[vjmanzo]

Yes!!!

On a related note: I’ve added all of the manuals and catalogs and electronics and wiring guides I’ve gathered through the years as, I think, these no longer exist anywhere online!

[jb63]

We can maybe use the wayback machine to grab some archived pages from the old forum, but in all seriousness, wouldn’t it be better to contact us music and pay the site fees ourselves at least for a year to migrate the 15 + years of posts over to here?

[vjmanzo]

I agree,@jb63: it would be great to have that whole database, but all of those posts are the IP of Parker Guitars—>USM—>JAM Industries and it seems like they’re not interested in supporting anything along the lines of Parker Guitars including the forum.

This Fly Clone Project forum has a related, albeit fundamentally different, purpose than the old forum, but we can certainly use it as some means of support for those of us still using Parker guitars.

[Patzag]

We can maybe use the wayback machine to grab some archived pages from the old forum, but in all seriousness, wouldn’t it be better to contact us music and pay the site fees ourselves at least for a year to migrate the 15 + years of posts over to here?

I am trying to get in touch with them. I went UP the line with no success. I'm going to try starting closer to the top. We'll see how that goes.
But I'm going away on business for 2 weeks so it will have to be when I am back.

[vjmanzo]

If you can get permission from them for us to restore the forum on another platform, I’ll absolutely set up a server for it so they don’t need to continue hosting anything!! We just need to get their permission and access to the old forum back-end.

[jjozwia]

What a sad day but happy fly lives on regardless of what happens to the official sites

[vjmanzo]

@jjozwia Agreed!!!

[billy]

thrilled that VJ's hard work on this site allows us to still communicate. I'd miss you guys!

I'm going to put a post on the facebook group, but not many of those users were active on the forum.

I'm still of the opinion that perhaps they're simply migrating to a different hosting service and it will be back up soon. Washburn is still up, randall is down, usm is down, the forum is down and parker guitars is down too.

On the other hand, maybe they actually sold the brand and we'll see something new soon?

[vjmanzo]

Love your optimism @billy! It would be great to see Parker Guitars (or even just the website!) reborn in some capacity.

I also noticed that the Washburn site was up and running; it’s hard to accurately know what that means.

Regardless, the Fly Clone Project was always intended to operate regardless of what officially transpired with Parker Guitars, so, while we wait to see what the future is for the Parker brand I agree: I’m glad we can all still communicate and, given Parker’s cult following, I’d be sad to not be able to be in touch with fellow Fly-obsessives!

[billy]

Right on VJ!

Unfortunately someone on FB who is relatively well connected to usm seems to think they are officially done. I’m surprised if they’re shutting down Randall too.

I guess it makes the clone project that much more relevant, and looking forward to seeing this forum grow and hopefully become a more concise version of the best of the old. Excited to be involved in any capacity.

Long live the fly!

[vjmanzo]

Sadly, I’ve confirmed that the old forum is, in fact, completely lost.

A quote from my personal contact at USM who asked me to express their regret in the outcome:

JAM was sold last year and security updates were required throughout the company which included all websites and associated forums. They truly were badly needed and the time came to go through with the updates. We delayed the Parker one until the bitter end trying to find some backway in and it simply wasn’t possible. JAM acquired Parker with the acquisition of USM and the website/forum came with it. The admin access of the file upload site proved to be something we never had and were sadly unable to get in the end. Us at USM were/are quite devastated as we know it holds years of immense, extremely valuable information that now is lost.

[Patzag]

For those who are really curious ... JAM was acquired by a Petroleum company. The world of corporate machinations is well beyond my horizon and far beneath my lowest level of contempt. Unfortunately, it's always the end users that lose.

Allright, rant off, let's keep the flame alive!

[vjmanzo]

... JAM was acquired by a Petroleum company.

What a crude state of affairs!

[Notes_Norton]

They heard guitar players had GAS

[vjmanzo]

They heard guitar players had GAS

[Mr303]

Sadly, I’ve confirmed that the old forum is, in fact, completely lost.

A quote from my personal contact at USM who asked me to express their regret in the outcome:

JAM was sold last year and security updates were required throughout the company which included all websites and associated forums. They truly were badly needed and the time came to go through with the updates. We delayed the Parker one until the bitter end trying to find some backway in and it simply wasn’t possible. JAM acquired Parker with the acquisition of USM and the website/forum came with it. The admin access of the file upload site proved to be something we never had and were sadly unable to get in the end. Us at USM were/are quite devastated as we know it holds years of immense, extremely valuable information that now is lost.

How about having your contact get in touch with their IT guys and see if the hard drive could be downloaded? They probably haven’t wiped or overwritten the drive yet so an informal down load might be possible.
Of course I know nothing of tech format etc but a swift IT guy could save the day.

[vjmanzo]

How about having your contact get in touch with their IT guys and see if the hard drive could be downloaded?

Technically speaking: if they didn’t know the admin password to the database but had access to the server, they could write their own login script and then have access. That would have been one solution, but, it seems that window of opportunity is gone.

[Noodler]

For those who may be unfamiliar with the Wayback Machine (yes this is a fun reference to the Peabody and Sherman segments from the Rocky and Bullwinkle show), here's some guidance.

This link will get you to what seems to be the last functional snapshot of the main forum index page:
https://web.archive.org/web/20190724195 ... itars.com/

There are a few later snapshots, but they don't get to any content when I tested them.

Looks like there are probably good snapshots of the content taken at multiple points from 2011-2019. The challenge is that the Internet Archive crawlers don't go deep into the web site's navigation levels. So you may find that the actual content of specific posts is unavailable in a particular snapshot, but if you change the snapshot (by navigating to a different date via the Wayback Machine's top page banner), sometimes you'll be able to find it.