A couple corrections, it's not just myself supporting this site, it's also some other people such as Galactic and Garrett and Hooman (certainly others as well, I don't mean to diminish work others have done) who have put in both time and money to keep this place running (not only does renting servers cost money but also there's a not-insignificant time investment for attempting to combat spammers and other garbage and keeping things like IRC working (and I know that we can do better in that regard since it tends to go down a lot, I am hoping to make some changes for the better at some point).
Now for my personal opinions regarding this whole situation with "alternative communities" or whatever else you want to call them:
I have been part of this community in some form or another probably running on 11 or 12 years now. The reigns have changed hands many times but as far as I'm concerned the community is safe to be considered the de facto "official" Outpost 1/2 fan site (obviously we do not have any official blessing but I am certainly not aware of any other fan community for OP1/OP2).
Now obviously I or anyone else here can't prevent other people from setting up some kind of OP2 fansite, the internet is a free medium. However I do think from a standpoint of "progress" we have the most active community and have done a lot of interesting work involving OP2 that hasn't been duplicated anywhere else to my knowledge (such as creating a map editor for the game, reverse engineering the game to the point where we can create new missions for it and much more, fixing the network protocol flaws and many other things). I'd really hate for these things to be completely lost, or ripped off from their original creators because someone created a "splinter community."
Furthermore as stated we are a small community and I don't think creating "alternate chat rooms" or whatever else does anything good for the Outpost series which would probably be lost and forgotten in some cyber-abyss if a community like ours didn't exist. I would much prefer that people who want to play OP2 get sent our way, to increase the player base and hopefully increase interest in this game.
Finally from a technical standpoint, (and I know very well this is probably going to sound like boasting though it's not my intention) I do IT for a living as does Galactic. I obviously won't make any legal guarantees about the safety or reliability of our site (doing so would expose myself and probably others to liability) but I feel that I can make a relatively convincing argument that OPU is a safe site to use that is ad-free and fairly secure (as much as we can without making parts a paid service or asking for donations or showing ads), something that we could never provide reassurance for external sites (indeed one of these "alternate chat rooms" I was shown was a mess with ads and other garbage, this is even with an ad blocking browser extension turned on; I recall some "OPU toolbar" that was posted that contained adware/spyware components as well which is absolutely not what I think anyone would like to promote here).
I'll also add that as a web site operator (and most web site operators would feel the same way) we'd prefer not to have links where traffic is being driven away from our site, especially when it's for reasons that people come to the site in the first place (OP1/2). This would be akin to someone posting a link to bing.com on google's front page. Pages that are filled with ads are especially in consideration here, because we already prohibit using this site for backlinks to websites that are purely for advertising revenue.
If these alternate chat rooms are being set up because people are having problems connecting to IRC, please post about it on the forums or PM an admin and we might be able to figure something out to allow you to connect to IRC somehow.
Also: please keep the flaming to a minimum. Ad hominem attacks regarding american schools or whatever else was being posted are not ok.
