The Town Herald

The netpaper about Elftowners, by Elftowners, for Elftowners.

Featured Interview - [Hedda] !

by [All_Most PUNK]



The Herald is a part of Elftown and as such, we like to accompany what happens on it. Recently there were several small and not so small changes in ET. Since there has been a lot of discussion about them, we thought a good idea to ask the Big Kahuna himself about them. Here's what Hedda has to say.

By The Herald Staff

• Why did you chose this particular moment for all these big updates? Or was it just a natural process?

It should be "choose".

• Nitpicker...

The thing was that I didn't want to move a button here, a button there and so on, but to move them all at once to shorten the frustration-period for people. Then I did a lot of work in other parts at the same time, so that stuff came all at once too.

After 2008-07-04 I've had a lot of time and will to work on the programming, so this month has been extremely productive. I hope I can keep it up for a while, because I have many more ideas to implement.

• Considering the amount of changes and the ideas implemented, how much time do you think you dedicated to the recent revamp? I think this is interesting for the people to know, since many time they just see the result and know nothing about the effort involved in creating it

3 weeks of work around the clock after the first update, and before that it was stuff done now and then. It's not that I don't work all the time, just that I don't get anything useful done most of the time. 

• Why are these updates important or desirable? Can you explain some of the most controversial ones, like the changes in the "Last Visitors" list?

Well, people see the use of it, but don't realize that it's causing them problems. It's like explaining to people that free booze isn't a great idea.

• Good analogy. You changed your mind about the list, correct? First it was completely gone and then returned in its current, changed way. Was that a middle point between what you really wanted and what the people did? Is it in your opinion a desirable middle point or an useless one that solves nothing?

Well, it's too complicated now with friends getting auto-added to the list and others have to add themselves. I like to get around without thinking too much about where I click though. I personally never used the last visitor list really.

• How much did you take into account the opinion of fellow Elftowners?

I make things, and then people can tell me what they think of it. It's quite pointless to ask people what they think about things before they have seen them. I also have to think of that if I give people everything they are asking for, then they will use this to annoy others beyond imagination (think about hideous MySpace pages that makes you not want to go there at all and chain message Facebook application that irritates almost everyone). But that said: Everything I do is made to please the Elftowners.

• You've been very supportive of FaceBook on ET. What are the main positive and negative points you see on it, compared to ET? Are some of the current updates based on them? We'll ignore MySpace for the moment, if that's ok with you

The removing of the last visitor list was definitely inspired by Facebook. The wiki-invitation feature was inspired in the way that I get very sick of chain messages being sent on Facebook, but they can be fun if they are sent in a way so that you only get one copy of them.

The tagging of people in photos is still not very simple on ET, so that's one of the few things that are better on Facebook. But when I'm on Facebook I miss our nice forums and wiki where one can add or change stuff. Elftown doesn't have stupid limits on photos and such either. Most importantly is Elftown nicely green...

• What kind of reaction did you expect to the changes and what did you get?

I didn't expect the strong feelings against change.

• How do you deal with negative feedback from community members?

I ignore the ones who just whine about "Turn it back as it was!" without giving any specific suggestions, but it's making me a little sad. If people point out how things should be better, then I like it, even if I don't agree.

• What is your personal favorite new feature?

Hm... That was hard. The mood-history of friends is nice. The previews are also quite nice.

• Which feature was the most troublesome to incorporate into Elftown?

The removing of the automatic last visitors due to all the whining... A major pain was also some simple HTML and stylesheet changes that for reasons I've forgotten or never understood messed up Elftown in IE6.0 or Firefox 2.0. The Javascript functions like the preview too almost no time to make, but it took a long time to learn how to do it right. The wiki-page invite took quite a while, but that was mostly because I rewrote the caching of a bunch of databases (It's making Elftown faster, but not a big difference, I think).

• Were there any updates you really wanted to add, but couldn't make the cut?

I don't work like that. Well... As for the rewriting of the layout, I stopped before attacking the forums. They need to be slimmer and faster.

Generally, I just get started and thinking about something, and then I implement it, if I get a clear view of how to do it well. Otherwise I put it on the TODO-list, where many things end up forever or until they are irrelevant due to other changes.

One thing that is becoming clear is that I should update Elftown often, because then it's easier to find the errors in the new code. And it's of course more fun to do programming if I can use what I've done right afterwards.

Right now I'm planning:
* Events. Basically Wiki-pages that starts with "event:". Event-pages have one or more dates (or a weekday or day of year) and will inform its watchers on those days. (2011-04-01: Remember to get dress! 2011-04-11 Attend to wedding.). You can also sign up as "Attending", "Maybe" or "Not attending" to an event, and if the wiki-page is commentable by not logged in users, they can sign up with their name/email. 
* Autosave when you're editing text areas (So if you don't submit something, you can find it in "Your Autosaves").
* Notifications about new submissions in the slots on Mainstreet (news, poems featured members) for those who haven't selected to not watch them.
* A "You might like" feature that suggests people who you might find interesting (depending on whom you currently have watch).
* Better and faster backup-system(s)
* Speeding up of Elftown. Right now Elftown hangs when someone searches, and that's not acceptable. Unfortunately it's a pain to run two MySQL servers on the same computer, so if I could get a small energy efficient search-server, it would make things simpler, even if I don't need more power to run the searches. Elftown's problem isn't that it has to much to do, but that it only does one thing at a time, and if that thing takes too long, it will hang for everyone. 

• Do you think soon we'll have those chances in the forums? You know that I'm kinda a big spammer on the forums, so you can imagine that it's something interesting for me to know.

"chances"? "changes", you mean? Referring to the autosave? That will go in almost every text area if I get it done well.

• The main difference to our current reminders system would be that wiki events would be shared between members, right?

That, and that it's on a wiki with versions and comments.

• How is the backup system working right now, after the problems we had?

Badly, but not horribly. I fixed yet another bug after the crash today, but the system is far from perfect (in the positive sense that there is things to do to improve it).

• Will we be seeing stylesheets to modify ET to our pleasure?

Eventually. Stylesheets make me sick. I really don't like polish them, and when for example [True, plain and simple] gives me improvements, I have to make sure that they really really works in the system (like for other sites like Elfpack and for the future and so on) and of course on all used browsers.

• Right now how many working stylesheets do we have?

I haven't tested or read through them, so I don't know.

• Do you think that in the future there's any chance for personalization of the ET features, like choosing order of the information on the status box or similar?

I don't think so, but maybe. It causes problem for people in many ways people don't seem to understand. Yes, maybe you don't want the message-button there, but people who are messaging you want it there so that you see that you have a message. And it will become hard to help people if we can't tell them where their buttons are.

• Are there any hints that you can give people about how to make suggestions? And where should they be given?

The suggestions forum or the Updates 2008-07-04 are generally good. Any kind of suggestion like "I want to do this!" is good. Things like "I want that in this way" are also good, but people have different views, so I might not happen, but the suggestion is still good. I think the most important thing is that people shouldn't be too afraid to suggest something that already exists, but they haven't found it. That gives me a hint about that it should maybe be easier to find.

• Is there anything else you want to add or tell to the people reading this interview?

Talk more about Elftown on the Internet and elsewhere!



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