Planet Half-Life

Planet Half-Life (often abbreviated to "PHL") is a gaming website owned by IGN and its subsidiary GameSpy. Maintained by a voluntary team of contributors, the site is dedicated to providing news and information about "Half-Life" and "Half-Life 2", related modifications and other Valve titles. It was founded by Kevin "Fragmaster" Bowen and was at one point the largest of an array of GameSpy-run gaming websites known as the Planet Network. Following GameSpy's closure, Planet Half-Life seems to have ceased updating.
Content.
Planet Half-Life's content consisted mainly of a news wire on its front page. Stories on updates, patches, press releases and events related to "Half-Life" and just about anything else concerning Valve are posted on an almost daily basis. These stories are also mirrored in the site's forum for reader comments.
In addition to the news, Planet Half-Life hosts extensive, in-depth collections of information regarding "Half-Life", "Half-Life 2" (along with "Portal"), "Counter-Strike", "Team Fortress" and "Day of Defeat". These sections cover overviews of each game as well as any official expansion packs related to them, as well as going over their storylines, important characters, enemies, weapons, cheats, walkthroughs, and, in the case of the multiplayer games, map overviews and strategies. The information found on these pages is original work drafted by the staff writers and senior editors collectively (although without any individual credits given, unlike other articles found on the site).
Other services.
Forum.
A major feature of Planet Half-Life, and all other planet sites, is its public forum. These forums include boards ranging from general discussion to technical help.
In August 2007, the forums changed format to comply with GameSpy's ForumPlanet standard (the "IGN SnowBoards" system), removing some outdated features and adding many new ones, such as a dynamic news box that streams in late-breaking news from not only PHL, but all other planet sites as well. This also changed the registration process for the forum, from a per-planet account basis to a network-wide, global account basis. At this time Planet Half-Life's sister sites Planet Fortress and CS.net were officially unsupported and their forums were to be merged into PHL's, although this process lasted over a year before it was complete.
Game servers.
Planet Half-Life has been running public game servers since 2006, hosting 24/7 map rotations for "Counter-Strike 1.6", ', ', "Half-Life: Deathmatch", "" and "Team Fortress 2". However, currently only the "Half-life 2: Deathmatch" and "Day of Defeat: Source" servers are consistently online and even they rarely see much use. The PHL servers are maintained by WOLFServers.com.
Steam Community.
In addition to public servers, Planet Half-Life also has a Steam Community group. Steam Communities are in early stages of development. The PHL Community can only host a chat room and specialized news updates for now, but more features will be added in the future based on suggestions from readers.
PHLWiki.
In June 2006, Planet Half-Life began its own wiki project. To date, the PHLWiki contains over a hundred articles dealing with fictional "Half-Life" characters, creatures and locations in an in-universe, encyclopedic form as well as real life articles on mods, player terminology and strategy guides. The in-universe and real life articles are kept separately, although they can be linked to each other. Before being announced publicly, most of the existing pages, particularly articles making up the fictional encyclopedia, were written by PHL staff writers. The PHLWiki is open to public viewing and editing.
Site hosting.
Planet Half-Life also offers free web hosting for "Half-Life" themed websites. The web hosting is regulated through GameSpy, though the address of hosted sites is a subset of the Planet Half-Life domain. This was a major attraction of the site in its early days and many original "Half-Life" mod teams took advantage of the offer. However this feature has not been utilized nearly as much since the release of "Half-Life 2". A directory of the old sites still exists, although most have been abandoned by their creators.
History.
Planet Half-Life has been running since April 27, 1999. Since then, it has undergone numerous format changes, both in content and aesthetic. The following is a timeline of major changes and other events.