The Starport has been running for roughly twenty years.
It launched around the same time the game did — before, in some accounts, in the pre-release period when the community was already forming. It has outlasted the Microsoft master server. It has outlasted the original Digital Anvil. It has outlasted every cycle of gaming discourse that declared old games dead and moved on. And it is still running right now, which is not a small thing.
What The Starport provides isn't obvious if you've never needed it. The forum archives contain two decades of technical documentation — INI editing guides, mod installation walkthroughs, compatibility fixes for successive generations of Windows and GPU hardware, the accumulated troubleshooting knowledge of a community that has been solving the same problems in new configurations for as long as the game has existed. If you hit an error running Freelancer on a modern system, the answer is probably in a Starport thread from 2008 or 2015 or last year.
The modding infrastructure lives there too. Hundreds of mods have been hosted or documented on The Starport over the years. Some of the community's most significant technical work — the unofficial patches, the server browser fix, the documentation of Freelancer's data formats — exists because The Starport provided a place for the people doing that work to share and build on each other's progress.
This is what fan infrastructure does for game preservation that no publisher handles. The official channels for Freelancer have been silent for nearly two decades. The Wayback Machine has the original Microsoft page. But the living knowledge — the kind you need to actually play the game in 2022 — lives on The Starport.
Sites like this one exist because The Starport proved the value of the approach: build something specific, maintain it, keep it useful. The Starport is the foundation everything else stands on.
Go there. Bookmark it. If you ever need help, the answer is probably already there.