Discovery Gaming Community

Hey guys,

I've tried hunting a few times over the years for a Freelancer Facebook group as it seems wrong that such a great classic of a game doesn't have a proper presence on social media. Doesn't help that the word 'freelancer' brings up a gazillion other unrelated groups in the fb search box lol!

I found a post at the starport mentioning 2 groups but the link is dead and I can't find any trace of the other one they mention.
https://the-starport.net/freelancer/news...toryid=154

So in the end I decided to make my own as over the years I've created groups for other ageing classic like Starflight, Master of Magic, and Sid Meier's Colonization which have been going quite well and have grown into nice little communities. You can find it here:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/freelancergame/

If there are indeed some existing Freelancer FB groups please let me know where they are so I can join. If there's some really big good ones out there that I've failed to find then I'll get rid of mine as they'll be no need for it!

https://www.facebook.com/discoverygc/ not very active, not sure who is Admin for it.

(04-21-2018, 03:03 PM)Tunicle Wrote: [ -> ]https://www.facebook.com/discoverygc/ not very active, not sure who is Admin for it.

Thanks man. I was just talking about this with another fellow (might be you?) who joined last night. Looks like there's a bunch of Freelancer pages on fb but not groups.

The best one is this one which I've followed for years..
https://www.facebook.com/FreelancerGame/

Crossfire appear to have one too.
https://www.facebook.com/FreelancerCrossfire/

However they all have the same problem in that they're a 'fb news page' instead a 'fb group' which means its just 1 or 2 dudes posting news to subscribers, and their fans can only make posts that are hidden away and not seen by other fans (due to no notifications & you have to go to a separate community wall section that nearly no one bothers to look at). Groups are so much better as you can actually create a lasting community. The page admin can still post news about their respective project (if the group is about that) but the fans can post out in the open too leading to lots of good discussions. Even if the admin goes inactive the group lives on. You just can't do that on a news page and as a result they just die out...

Also found that groups makes a handy backup for ageing forums too. For example I'm a big Starflight fan and in 2015 the SF forum community was in bad shape (thankfully the Freelancer community is in MUCH better shape). 3 of the big 5 forums from the 2000s were gone and the 2 left weren't looking too good either. As a passionate SF fan I didn't want what was left of the community to die off especially as they were working on the Starflight 3 fan game (a pipe dream but a good one) so I created a Starflight facebook group and invited all to drop by and sign up as a backup. Naturally there were several people who said they didn't have fb or that it was evil etc lol. Well.. those guys are gone now.. lost forever.. we don't know where they are.. as last year the last of the SF forums went down and the fb group was all we had left. Fortunately most of the community had signed up by then. Just recently we hit the 170 members mark and were able to get together as a community on there ti track down and get in contact with the admin of the old SF3 site to get him to bring the forums back online and even get the SF3 project going again. Without the fb group, that probably wouldn't have happened and the forum would have just disappeared into oblivion along with the other SF forums. Sadly these days forums come and go all the time but fortunately facebook (love it or hate it) is not going anywhere and its a cool tool for keeping game fan communities going. The other cool thing that happened was new people or old members who hadn't visted the SF forums in years found the facebook group just by doing a fb or google search for starflight and then used my forums links on the fb group page to go and sign up at the forums or return to their ancient forum accounts when they saw some life back there. We had one guy appear who no one had seen on the forums in 10years show up at the fb page lol!

Needless to say I've put links to the Starport, Discovery & Crossfire forums in a pinned group post lol! Oh and if any of the admin here wanna join, pm me who you are and I'll make you an admin there. That way if I get hit by a bus you guys can keep it going lol!

There is another page for the Freelancer : Mostly Harmless mod, but sadly the guy who was working on that mod seems to have discontinued his work (or at the very least hasn't posted any updates on it in a good couple of years)

(05-14-2018, 07:19 AM)Gunbladelad Wrote: [ -> ]There is another page for the Freelancer : Mostly Harmless mod, but sadly the guy who was working on that mod seems to have discontinued his work (or at the very least hasn't posted any updates on it in a good couple of years)

Ah yes, I've just found it, thanks. Yeah looks pretty dead sadly, and once again its a fb news page and not a fb group which probably wasn't doing it any favours!

Figured I may as well post this here..

It's been slow going but the old Freelancer Facebook Group is finally closing in on 100 members mark which is nice. Got me thinking about whether Freelancer was properly represented on other big social media platforms like Reddit and Discord too. Figured if I couldn't find any I'd make my own, however I was pleased to see that I didn't have to worry as there's some pretty healthy groups out there on them these days.

Here's the links if it's of interest to anyone...

Freelancer Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/freelancer/
Freelancer Discord: https://discord.gg/tnrm4CB

Nice to see Freelancer preserved and having a presence on all major social media platforms now.

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