I was a part of another active community at the time working with the Quake source code. We were trying to take it to new boundaries and develop new standards for its usage. Surprisingly it still exists,
http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/quakesource/ ...the original host however seems to have been taken over by Yahoo and there hasn't been a meaningful post there in years.
One of the other devs there, Tane Piper had a link to Planetarion on his project page. I figured what the hell and clicked it, been hooked ever since. I knew no one else who was playing so I figured there might be an IRC channel I could hook up with some peeps through. I jumped onto my usual stomping grounds at efnet and sure enough there was a #Planetarion channel there, but no one spoke any english, just this bizarre language they call Norwegian
I decided to try another popular IRC network and switched to Dalnet, once again there was indeed another #planetarion channel, but it only had like 2-3 members in it. I inspected the list, just some bozos by the names Athan, Messiah & Zeus. Apparently by some freak chance I had just stumbled into their channel they created not more than 5 minutes ago.
Another interesting bit of trivia is the guy that originally got me into the game, Tane, is one of the devs working for
Crytek on their Silent Space game. This was long before they were as well known as they are now for Farcry.