The Town Herald

The netpaper about Elftowners, by Elftowners, for Elftowners.

An interview with [Hedda]

Interviewed on May 23, 2009 by [Alexi Ice]



Q: So Hedda, as the mayor of our lovely community of Elftown what do YOU think of these frequent problems that Elftown has been having?

A: Blärgh! It's actually 2 problems. One was the crash due to power failure and worn out UPS that made Elftown go down 11:40 to 15:48 on Friday 2009-05-22. That's a fixable problem by buying a new UPS. The constant network problems is however for an unknown reason and therefore not fixable. I've now eventually minimized the problem with a script that restarts Elftown's network in 30-90 seconds after there are no accesses to Elftown, but I still don't know why there is a problem. I suspect that it's the combination of stupid equipment at the ISP, the network code on [Elftron] and temporarily high traffic.

Q: Most people nowadays seem afraid that it will go under and never come back up. Is this fear justified?

A: Not for this reason. The real risk is that Elftown doesn't grow, and then there is a big risk that the quality of Elftown will go down over time as mine and others' interest in it goes down. I'll not suddenly shut Elftown down though. I'm not that kind of person and I'm still having the pretty much dead sites up, just so that people's bookmarks and old stuff still can be accessed. It doesn't cost me much. But if Elftown grows up to about 100 000 active members, I can make it much less dependent on me as a person, which would be good for everyone.

Q: Do you have any ideas what is causing these problems such as inability to log on, problems uploading images, etc?

A: See above.

Q: Do you think the problems will be fixed by the time this interview is posted in July?

A: They got sort of fixed yesterday (this night, Saturday-Sunday 2009-05-23), but unless the ISP fixes the network or I find something I can do, I have no idea of how to make it 100%. Now it is 99% OK.

Q: Do you ever get frustrated with your duties as Mayor? Like these technical difficulties?

A: I'm used to it. They are a pain, of course, but I don't bang my head against the keyboard or cry about it.

Q: Since the theme this month is 'phobias and fears', do you have any fears or phobias you would like to share?

A: Except for another power failure, a fire in this house or a burglar in Elftown's computer hall would be a real disaster. I'll work on off-site backups, but due to Elftown's limited resources it's hard. And I don't want to spread Elftown's data to insecure places.

Q: We all know that Lilo is the true leader of Elftown and that you just do her bidding, so does Lilo have any fears? Like giant rats or something?

A: Lilo is careful about most things actually. Everything noisy, unknown and big.

Q: Would you like to make an official statement to your fans and enemies alike?

A: Well... If you have suggestions, tell me! Very specific and simple stuff like extra help-texts, a button moved/changed or something like that is very likely to be implemented. If you make a really stupid suggestion, I'll think it's a very stupid suggestion, but I'll not think that you're stupid, so don't worry about that!

Q: What made you think of creating Elftown and its affiliates to begin with?

A: I got inspiration from a similar Swedish site. That one hasn't improved though and is still like Elftown were 6 years ago. The wiki idea come from another direction of course, and the merging of wiki and profiles is unique to Elftown. The equally much hated and much loved forums draws inspiration from LysKOM, which is a non-web conference system that never got any big spread outside of Linköping University or even here, but I'm still using it to read news, babble and discuss.

Q: Will you agree to do more interviews for the Herald in the future?

A: Of course, I will.


I would like to thank Hedda for his cooperation in this interview and apologize for the seemingly random questions.




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