A news/information site for Team Fortress in all it's incarnations. One of the many "Planet X" sites owned by GSI (Gamespy Industries).
Planetfortress.com had it's beginnings in the Team Fortress Newswire, an excellent news site for the Team Fortress community that was hosted on Planet Quake. Run primarily by Spaceman Spif and later theHal the Newswire was offered the chance to become the newest addition to the "Planet" family in July of 1998.
Shortly after becoming PlanetFortress the site began to dominate the the community offering significant amounts of hosting to smaller sites. This included such community staples as the Citadel, Ethereal TeamFortress (briefly), CFTF, and even the official Quake Team Fortress page. This served to both solidify and dillute the close-knit community that had built up surrounding the mod. While it brought many sites together at a single focal point it also tended to draw all attention away from other independent sites, achieving a near stranglehold on TeamFortress news.
While PlanetFortress was accused of "selling out" from the beginning, especially by those who disdain GSI as the Microsoft of online gaming, this caused the community to start to buckle rapidly. Many major sites left the scene as did numerous significant figures in the community.
This all came to a head in June of 2000 when GSI removed without warning a site being hosted by Bundy -- a greatly respected elder figure known for honor, sportsmanship and team play -- at the request of a single e-mail. The site belonged to "Phat Dragon" or PhD as he was commonly known. A shadowy fixture in the community of unknown origins that was often reputed to be the alter-ego of various people. Phat Dragon's site, while definately not family-friendly, was in a satirical, largely offensive style characteristic to him (similar in many ways to SomethingAwful's JeffK)and was in many ways a massive inside joke. Bundy left Planetfortress immediately after registering the appropriate complaints over what he felt was an inexcusable act by GSI. Many others chose to follow suit and boycott GSI's sites and software products.
Today most of the major figures of the past have left the community as well as Planetfortress itself and many of the old sites are no longer around. Planetfortress itself stands as one of the few sites left in what was once a proud and vibrant community. Those few sites that still exist (most notably Ethereal TeamFortress although it is dead in almost all but name) are either rarely updated or have moved to focus on other avenues.