Lancers Reactor history and FAQ

[w0dk4]

Since this topic seems to keep coming, I’ll just write out some points so that old/returning Lancers Reactor members understand what this is all about.

TLR: The Lancers Reactor
TSP: The-Starport

What is this site and how does it relate to lancersreactor.com? (aka the history of TLR and TSP)

As you can see here, TSP was created in 2008 in parallel to TLR.

At that time, TLR was in trouble since it’s hosting ended and all content had been removed. TLR essentially got rebooted with multiple efforts in place to resurrect it. However, all resurrection actions failed.

The very first reboot was led by Louva Deus, after long-winded chats on the IRC channel involving most of the active community at the time. Quickly, Turion came in to help him run the site. Unfortunately, attempts at rebuilding the community were met with failure upon failure, as reboots happened in quick succession, causing more and more people to leave each time. It was at that point that The Starport was created as an attempt to show the TLR leads how a simple site could be created in very little time and still house a strong community. Disputes arose and Louva Deus left the administration team to Turion.

After a time, the site was transfered to Mental Chaos by Eraser’s wishes. Mental Chaos proved to show little care in the community and TLR withered, faster even when he brought AzzA and Knife onto his team. At this time, many found refuge in new and old communities; The Starport, Freelancer Community, SWAT Portal, the now defunct Haven Admins, etc.

At some point in time, the TLR.com domain was given to a man unknown in the community, who proceeded to rebrand his online game to use the domain to little success. TLR.com was considered dead by all at this point, and rose TLR.org from its ashes. Now held by AzzA as the head admin, the site did not grow by much and instead lashed out at most if not all other communities through denial of service attacks, rampant site scraping (in large part to recover the old TLR database they had not managed to decrypt, instead stealing it from other sites that had), etc.

Finally, AzzA gave the TLR.org domain to SWAT_OP-R8R, who proceeded to restore the site without further interferences from the former admin.

In April 2011, the TLR domain was not renewed. In an auction, we aquired the domain to save both old returning and new FL fans from getting mislead by third party advertising companies.

During all this time, TSP has been a ever-growing community that sheltered many during the difficult times, often working with other communities to easen the pains caused by the demise of the old TLR.

Why didnt you re-create TLR when you got the TLR resources?

Since we didn’t own the domain until 2011, we didn’t think it would be worthwile to, yet again, reboot the community. Also, it would have been awkward to create a seperate TLR community while not owning the original domain.
What we did with the TLR resources was to give old and new members a chance to re-visit old content from the TLR forums and downloads. We established the archived TLR forums and downloads in 2008 (actually, the only place back then to access those publicly). We did not merge the sites as we wanted to make it clear that the old posts were not ours and had been restored from days past. Likewise, we found it best not to integrate old members, for we had never had permission from all of them to reinsert and reuse their user details and credentials. We judged that posts were valuable and always noted that we would pull posts if people desired so, but we did not think we should use the old database as a way of propelling us ahead. Instead, we stripped all accounts of any sensitive information, leaving only the names so that the posts still made sense.

Is there a community that is based on the old TLR resources?

That would be lancersreactor.org, however there is no official tie between the pre-2008 TLR.com and this new TLR.org site.

Why dont you give them the TLR.com domain?

We do not agree with the way lancersreactor.org is run. For a start, they are censoring our site. Also, all staff members of TSP are banned at TLR.org for no apparent reason.

Why did you get the TLR.com domain in the first place?

As said earlier, we wanted to give returning and new FL fans an unfiltered view on the current Freelancer community. With the Freelancer Community Network and our up-to-date modding resources we think we do a good job at that.