I have been collecting flyers since the year of 1996. I was attracted by the colorful artwork on hardcore flyers in those days. My first target was to completely cover a wall in my room with flyers. That was something that a lot of people would do in that time. While the years passed, I finished that wall, and another wall and the ceiling would soon follow.

Some years later, while browsing the internet, I stumbled upon the website of hyperreal, where a hugo collection of rave flyers was to be found. I was very impressed by this online collection, and I immediatly decided that this was the perfect way to share a collection with the rest of the world. Together with a friend I started to work on the first version of the flyerdatabase, which came online on some private server in the end of 2003 under "www.flyerdatabase.tk". My friend did the most of the programming and I started digitizing every flyer I had, including lots of flyers from friends.

The self-written website worked fine, but soon I longed to a more sophisticated system for the database. While getting my first payed server in 2005, I found out about Coppermine. This easy to use image album package fullfilled al my needs. I enthusiastically started to migrate the flyers, I buyed the domain "www.flyerdatabase.nl", and with the help of a good friend all flyers received a proper description. Because of my naive mind, I thought it would be ideal if every visitor of the site could drop a line, and every user could register without authorization. Soon the website would be hacked, defaced and spammed with more than 100.000 comments about sex and viagra.

Much wiser than before, I relaunched the flyerdatabase in 2008 with more security and control on a professional payed server. In the meantime the database has increased up to more than 2500 files, and is extended with a increasing digiflyer section. Because of the vast amounts of time invested in this database, my personal planning is to keep this database online for as long as I am able to use the internet.

Tom Geraedts, December 2008.

The Mission is simple: To complete this database as much as possible with European house/rave flyers, and to keep this database online available untill the end of days.

Feel freely to register, which allows you to upload and maintain flyers.

Why create a database?
A database allows one to conveniently search/interpret a large amount of data. In the case of the flyerdatabase its easy to sort flyers on date, location, organization, concept, etc.

Every flyer is the intellectual property of the organization who has published it. For the normal paper flyer, nobody really cares what happens with them. But for the new digiflyers, opinions might differ.

Personally, I think that the large rave flyers from well before 2000, could be seen as the digiflyers from the past. The flyers from then were printed on large glossy (expensive) paper and contained lots of (expensive) artwork (especially without decent computers). Organizations made those flyers to differentiate themselves from the rest.

These days, digiflyers are (relatively) expensive to produce, and may be more of a website than an old fashioned flyer. But still, they are the artwork of these times relating to the rave culuture. And therefore I collect them.

In the few years that digiflyers are around, I have seen dozens of them appear on organization websites, and disappear forever after the actual date of the event or after the termination of the organization. Because the FLASH medium, the language of digiflyers, doesnt really contain a "save as" function, I can imagine that only few people made backups of the digiflyers. Which is only more reason for me to try to collect them.

Im very clear, when I state that I will never have commercial intentions with the placement of flyers or digiflyers on my website. At the moment (Dec, 2008), this website is ad-free. But it will depend on the amount of visitors and data traffic whether this website is something that I can afford to maintain without ads or donations.

If you have any problems problems with material on this website, then please contact me at info@flyerdatabase.nl
I will be happy to have a dialog and to take material offline if necessary.

Vast amounts of time/flyers have been invested in this website/database. And some people just have to be thanked:

Irondog (programming)
M (database)
Marcel (flyers)
Pep (design)