Hey fellow veteran Freelancers

Our site was crashing a few times in the last weeks and we could identify a bad hard drive. The hard drive got replaced and we are up and running again - hopefully this was actually the reason for the crashes. Keep in mind we are already running on enterprise-class level hard drives so we cannot really improve this situation. But I guess our last HDD failure happened 3 years ago (wow time is running fast) so it's actually not too bad.

All the best,
w0dk4

It has been reported that a Cloudflare HTTPS vulnerability may have caused sensitive information to be leaked in a period spanning the past few months. The Starport uses Cloudflare, and as a result, we are recommending you change passwords onto all affected websites, including The Starport.

The vulnerability is no longer active, so we will not switch Cloudflare off at this time.

Update:

Looks like Emails to Microsoft providers are working again!

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Sadly, Hotmail/Outlook has classified our server as Spam and we cannot seem to resolve this since they do not provide any useful information. I reviewed if spam was actually sent out and I suspect some users simply flagged too many mails sent from us as spam/junk mail. We do not really send out a lot of mails so I suspect this came from users that had notification settings set up that alert them of new posts on some threads in our forums via e-mail.

Hey guys,

since donations have dried up a little bit (thanks anyway!), I decided that I will switch to a lower-cost server sometime next week. The new server will save us 20€ per month while the hardware is almost the same - the CPU being a little less powerful while we actually get an upgrade to enterprise-level HDDs! Everything will essentially stay the same. I expect the downtime to be at most a couple of hours but it could extend to a whole day, depending on arising problems.

Hello fellow Freelancers

As you might have noticed, we experienced a prolonged downtime of the website for the most part of this week.
This was caused by a double hard disk failure on our root server. The Starport runs on a RAID1 configuration, however, since one hard disk completely failed while the other was also slowly failing, this meant that the website was getting slower and slower until it finally was barely reachable.

Fortunately, the hard disk content could mostly be rescued (except for less than 200 KB of bad block data). Meanwhile, both hard disks have been replaced and the site is running smooth again.

I'm sorry for the downtime and I'm going to take measures so that this will not happen again.

Best,
w0dk4

10 years ago on March 4th, 2003, Freelancer was released. To this day, Freelancer remains to be the reference in space action and role playing games.

Chances are that this year will be a very interesting one for the game. Interest in the genre is rising again and we might see some major mod releases this year. Also, it has been rumored that a digital release of the game could happen very soon.

However, we also need to take a look at the more distant future. Freelancer is getting older and so is our website. Hopefully this year, I will try to get away from Xoops (our current CMS) and relaunch the website using a major forum software (phpBB or SMF) as the main website element. We will keep the Wiki and the Forge.
As regards the site content, I think our strength is covering space games with support for modding and private servers. So far, there have been almost no reasonably good games in this segment since Freelancer. With Star Citizen however, this might change (...)

We recently switched to CloudFlare which is a content delivery network provided for free to websites. Advantages are that we get certain security features (such as anti-ddos) for free.
Also, the website should load a little faster.

Please report your experience with load times or any problems with accessing the site in the comments or in the Site Feedback forum.

Hello everyone!

This is a general announcement that I will move the website to a new server over the coming two weeks. This might cause the website to be inaccessible for a few days, however, I will try to make the downtime as short as possible on the hardware side. DNS propagation times may vary depending on your ISP.

The reason for the server move is that we get a lot more power and storage for the same price. We don't really need it but it's still a nice-to-have just in case.

On this occasion, I want to thank all the various people who have donated to cover the costs of running this site. It's far from enough though, so the ads will have to stay.

See you on the other side,
w0dk4

The-Starport started active and strong back in 2008, but over time we have lost pretty much all of our staff members to inactivity. We now have a fairly active and effective admin team but what we lack are some motivated staff members that can take on some of our burdens.

The most important tasks would be
- finding and posting news topics
- maintaining the Wiki
- forum moderation (mostly moving threads to their proper forum)
- creating new polls
- moderate website submissions (comments, downloads, news, etc..)

Also, we are looking into adding a new feature to the website: a "Random Hint" section on the left menu with trivia and tips/tricks about the game. This would be another project new staff members could take on to fill (or moderate submissions for).

If you would like to help us out, do not hesitate and either contact us in the comment section of this news post, or send a PM to w0dk4, FriendlyFire or Sushi. You can also email (...)

• You now get greeted with a very outstanding notice that you are actually browsing archived content.



• Also, HTML tags within the old posts are now fully recognized, making formatted posts a lot easier to read. In some places, this generates new formatting (...)
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