What is the purpose of this technical platform that Elftown is? It's not that obvious for a newbie to see when Elftown should be used, and when other things are better. This page tries to explain that.

Messages

Elftown messages don't really have any big advantages over email or instant messaging. You can use Elftown's pseudo HTML (See pseudo HTML) to make messages a little nicer and you can use Russian or Chinese letters without problems. The messages are also "threaded" which means that you always know what a message is a comment to.

But if you want to SPAM people, send viruses or other files, email is better. If you just want to talk, instant messaging is better.

Search

The first goal for Elftown was to make it possible to search for people with similar interests or some particular feature. If you need a model that is a fat girl from Motala (Sweden), it should be possible to search for her here. Of course it's nice to be found sometimes too.

If you find someone interesting, you can put that presentation ("house") on watch.

The problem here is mostly that not everyone is a member of Elftown...

Forums

The forums are made to be something between a very complex conference-system and a fast-to-learn message-board. If you want to have a discussion or talk with many people, the forums are a quick way to do that. Unlike normal stupid message-boards, the Elftown forums keep track of what you have read, so if you're only a member of the private forum "Me and my friends", you don't have to check that every time you log into Elftown, because Elftown shows when you have unread messages (called "postings") in the forums.

The forums can be used for three different things. These things are best kept in different forums:

1) To announce things to a group that is interested in that subject.
2) To discuss some subject with many people.
3) To just talk and try to meet new friends. A forum is better than one-to-one messaging because in the forum you don't have to come with a reply to every posting you read to make the messages keep coming.

The wiki

The wiki is just pages that anyone can edit. You can also put passwords on pages that you only want a small group to be able to edit (which makes it impossible for people to correct your spelling).

The main feature of the wiki is that you can edit texts together with other people and you get a history of what is done.

Another thing is that you can easily link different pages to each other, and therefore divide the information easily.

And if you want to share the pages you have created, you can export them to a URL that even people not logged into Elftown can see. The Elftown wiki does allow you to write pure HTML and CSS and export it too.

If you just want to simply chat about a subject, the wiki-page comments are perfect. They are very simple and not threaded like the forums and messages.

You can invite your friends to a wiki-page if it's something that they might find interesting (Like a party-planing page, a contest or some art in their style).

If you have wiki-pages on watch, you'll be notified if they are changed or have gotten a new comment.

The polls

The polls can be useful if you have a competition, or want to know what people think about a matter that can be put into a poll.



Go or return to:
-The wiki-index
-The Elftown mission statement
-The help index