You can DL the world from...somewhere around here...someone has the link, and you can pick up right where you left off in the world. You'd just be by yourself, is all.
Sure, did that a long time ago, downloaded the 1.0 world and rebuilt the sphinx, rebuilt the Arcata railway station, funnily enough I never got around to rebuilding much of my own town
Not much fun in single player building a road or a railway nobody's ever going to use, though.
It'd be cool if this "reunion server" was based on one of those old T9K maps (cooler for me if it was 1.0 or 1.5 LTS), but starting from scratch would be fine too, and I'm sure most people would prefer that for the sake of the challenge.
Regarding the suggestions that there should be just one town, or a limited number of towns, or we should all stay near spawn: The 1.0 world was pretty big. For a while, I lived on the edge of this and the Nether travel was broken. That didn't stop me regularly sailing around the world to trade. Now we're going to have horses and it'll be even easier to move around. (Rails will still be a grief problem though.)
I still don't get the problem with Towny. It was complex, but enough of us figured out how to use it and helped others. You can do nasty things with it like claim right next to another town, or eject someone from your town and not let them have their stuff, but you can do nasty things
without Towny too. And if you don't like the protections of Towny and want Outlands-style lawlessness, then just don't create a town, nobody will force you to, right? I'd like it to be there so
I can control my own stuff without having to join a town I don't trust and the mayor having access to my chests or something (which is more of an issue if we have only one town). Why can't I have what I want and you have what you want? Unless of course what you want is to be able to destroy and steal my stuff
Whitelisting the whole server: I agree, please don't, we need players, right? I know some of you used to get annoyed by new players and their typical new player questions, but some of us don't mind it. In the 1.0 world, I gave free plots to new players. It was a win/win - they didn't get griefed, I got to expand my town. If they annoy you, just ignore them, but don't forget some of them might stay and become new community members. I assume those who want the Outlands experience wouldn't want whitelisting either, since part of that experience was the risk of getting griefed?
PvP: I was never interested in this, and StTheo's server reinforced this for me. It sucks if your ping is really bad and you don't have enough time to spend on the server to mine enough diamonds to have all the armor that the powerful players have. In the 1.0 and LTS worlds, I did a lot of trading; if there's PvP everywhere, I pretty much would not trade because how do I know I'm not going to get robbed?
Trading is something that makes us move around, see other people, and for me at least enhances the sense of community - I might have lived in some towns where I was generally by myself, but I spent a lot of my time at spawn and in other towns. I'm not saying make trading compulsory, make plugins that force it to happen, but just let it happen if people want it.
I think a good compromise would be to have one 1.0-like world (Towny and no PvP) and one Outlands-like world. That way we should all be happy right? I don't think that just letting people turn off PvP in their own town would be very helpful, that would still prevent those of us who don't want to get killed from ever going anywhere. Alternatively, perhaps one world, but the eastern half is the Outlands and the western half is 1.0-like?
I'd still see trading as an option if we did this - I'd be happy to travel anywhere in the safe area, and anyone from the Outlands could meet me at spawn - or maybe an intermediary could do the delivery on that side.
I think the 1.0 world, and Outlands too from what I've read, really had a lot of freedom for people to choose their own experience (although of course you needed to mine some diamonds to start a town in 1.0). I think rules like "everyone must live in one town" (sorry if I'm mis-remembering what was suggested here), despite the good intentions to try to solidify the community, probably won't help, because everyone has their own ideas about what will make the game good and if we limit what you're allowed to do on the server, we're going to turn away some of the very community members we're trying to reunite.
[Edit: Also, sorry for wall of text, I tried pretty hard to cut it down, but then I had a week of stuff to reply to
]