The story author, Steven York, has dropped by before and actually emailed one of us. If you do some searching you can probably find something. He was amazed that people are still interested in the game after how long it's been since its release.
I have had some limited correspondence with Mike Jahnke (the art director), mostly all involving some questions about some of the artwork and tools used to create it. Maybe I'll search for those emails sometime and post them up here.
I have also talked with Dan Duncalf (the programming lead) but this was an extremely long time ago and I don't have any of the emails or recall any bits of the conversation anymore.
Honestly though any correspondence has been very limited, since it was such a long time after they stopped working for Dynamix so they couldn't remember all that much about it (or even were at liberty to talk about; I know personally as a software engineer IRL that I had to sign an NDA in order to work for the company I currently work for which prohibits me from disclosing anything to anyone outside the company that could be construed as a trade secret and I'm sure the same applied here as well). Many of them moved on to work for other companies later on. I am personally not in contact with any of them but if I really had a reason to, it probably wouldn't be impossible to get ahold of someone.
Dynamix was located in Eugene, OR. (Dynamix was the actual developer of the game; Sierra was just responsible for publishing).
I believe Sierra or one of the companies associated with it at the time (Cendant or Havas) ran SIGS/WON. It was shut down due to lack of use (there is no business sense in running a bunch of servers if not enough people are going to use them to make it worthwhile from a business perspective).
If you want to donate money to OPU, you can PM Galactic or myself. It would go towards paying for our hosting (servers and bandwidth).
Regarding bans, we don't discuss bans openly. He is not banned anymore (at least isn't supposed to be), he was temporarily banned (I know the reasons behind said ban and it was for a serious reason which involved another member in the community, but I am not willing to discuss it). He is not banned anymore, apparently the ban script did not remove him from the banned group (which shouldn't even affect his ability to use the forum, it would just show "banned" everywhere next to his name). I fixed this manually.
But those of you who actually do send the 'you will be banned if' letters please look over your letters youv sent a few times and see if it could perhaps be considered emotional or even threatining (of anyway possible cyberbullying).
If these are messages that didn't come from a mod or admin then it should probably be disregarded (potentially was meant as a friendly warning to the member, before a mod or admin actually got involved).
If they are from a mod or admin I don't see how it constitutes bullying, there are rules that are clearly posted in various different places and if someone notices these aren't being followed then a PM or warning might be sent or issued.
Or better yet lets have a moderator look into all the pms ECC has... if thats legal. I as one have a way to contact him... i will do so when i get home tonight if i dont forget.
We can look at PMs if we absolutely needed to (it's on our server and this is also mentioned in the agreement when you register) but the only time anyone has ever had to look at someone's PMs is when there been some complaint of harassment from another user or something similar which would violate the rules (in some circumstances potentially even present a legal liability to those of us who run the site and pay for the servers).
In any case, this discussion about bans is completely offtopic and this is the last I have to say on that issue.
