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What is Elftown?

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2007-02-28 00:32:32

Last author: kittykittykitty
Owner: Hedda

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About Elftown

This is the text that I put on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elftown and it contains some background information about Elftown.

'''Elftown''' is a community devoted to [[science fiction]] and [[fantasy]] artists. It was started in [[2002]].

It began as a part of the [[Elfwood]] project, another non-profit project. Since then, it has evolved into a community in it's own right, where members who share interests in Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Art and Writing can meet and mingle. It hosts various contests for Art, Photography and Writing, and members can win awards for participating in site activities.

Elftown has an extensive wiki, customisable member pages, Diaries, Polls and many Forums.

==History==
The plan behind Elftown was at first to build a dating site construction software. As Elfwood already used a [[LiveJournal]] community that didn't work that well, the dating site software seemed to be able to be adjusted to run discussion forums, building of art galleries, and other things that interested the people of Elfwood. Elfwood had thought about using [[LysKOM]] as the software for its forum, but that failed because it was too hard to get not so computer educated artists and writers to use that complicated conference system. But LysKOM inspired the Elftown forums a lot, which makes them a very unique kind of web-forums. Hard to use, but very powerful when you get used to the idea.

Then a wiki was added, and that wiki is now about 20 GByte of texts (mostly compressed), and an amount of articles that dwarfs many other wikis. Mostly that wiki is filled with personal pages, galleries and even chat-rooms. There are functions for votings, different kinds of threaded messaging (not like chat-messages), blogging, webpage-building (in the wiki) and "stalking" functions.

==Popularity==
In September 2004, about 14000 fantasy and science fiction lovers from the entire world logged into the site, making it one of the biggest in Sweden, and one of the third largest on Lysator. In February 2007 it has over 180,000 members.

In [[2004]] a new site built on the Elftown base was made: [[Baltbalt]], and more followed, but Elftown is the most successful one yet, mainly thanks to the important creatability given by the very old Elfwood project.

==External link==
http://elftown.eu/

A copy of this article in the Elftown wiki:
http://elftown.eu/_Wikipedia

And Elfwood:
http://elfwood.lysator.liu.se/elfwood.html

2005-04-05 [Gilthoron]: far out

2005-06-12 [windowframe]: Some of the bracketed words are now displaying as non-working username links...

2005-07-09 [iippo]: I'm getting that as well.

2005-08-09 [Hedda]: Well, the syntax at wikipedia is not working as Elftown psuedo HTML. And the bastards deleted the Elftown entry there and just put a note under Elfwood. Feel free to make an edit-war...

2006-05-10 [kittykittykitty]: I added the entry again at wikimedia ^_^

2006-05-16 [kittykittykitty]: I fixed the brackets issue too. And added again. I don't see why they delete it...

2006-05-17 [Shreya]: ElfwoodGurl -> Elfwood

2006-05-17 [Shreya]: "Last week" should probably go too?

2006-10-29 [Stephen]: Hmmm.. If we prove that Elftown is a community on it's own that although involved with Elfwood, it is not directly ran by or connected to Elfwood, wouldn't wikipedia be more likely to accept Elftown as a page on it's own..?

2006-11-10 [kittykittykitty]: Uhmm..... o.0" How would we do that? :)

2006-11-11 [Stephen]: Well, Elftown is a Science Fiction/Fantasy community for writers, authors and lovers to hand around and discuss those topics and subjects. It is true that Elftown was orginally designed to really run around Elfwood, but it doesn't do that as much anymore. Now it's a place for people with those interests to meet and mingle, even if they have nothing at all to do with Elfwood.

We'd need to put something along those lines.. or just tell that to a/the wikipedia admin guy. :)

2007-02-28 [kittykittykitty]: OK, I tried to add it again with a little Rewording :D I don't edit Wikipedia much, so I don't know how well it will fit with the standards, but it's a good start ^-^; It keeps getting deleted :/

2007-02-28 [Sunrose]: They don't consider it something that should be on Wikipedia..

2007-02-28 [kittykittykitty]: <img:44166_1164145209.gif>

Does anyone know how to avoid it's deletion? Those guidelines don't make much sense to me :P

2007-02-28 [Sunrose]: They have discussed the deletion on the Talkpage I think, but it has all been removed. So I suppose the only way to get info, is talking to one of those people..

2008-07-20 [Hedda]: There's now a new article on Elftown. It has been marked and then unmarked for deletion. What Elftown really needs are articles about Elftown.

2008-07-21 [Hedda]: Update the Wikipedia article to include some info from here maybe? They have some rule about that I shouldn't write about Elftown so it's best if someone else does it.

2008-07-27 [Hedda]: Sounds OK. Add it!

But their critisism is mainly about references. We have reference from Elfwood, but there is no article about Elftown there. You can point out that Elfwood is the main authority in the popular fantasy art genre and the reference from there is good enough.

2008-07-27 [Hedda]: I have root access to Elfwood's server so I can what-ever I please... <img:stuff/mood17-gif.gif>

But I wount, of course. But I think Elftown and Elfwood could do an exchange of news actually. We can post news about each other. [thomas] is on vacation now, but I'll talk to him.

Then we could have someones who are more independant than me and Thomas to write the articles. That could be a contest! I guess the articles have to be written about someone who's pretty into both sites, otherwise it will just become crap.

2008-07-27 [Hedda]: Cool! <img:stuff/dand-gif.gif>

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