Elftown
Elftown is an Internet community or social networking site for people interested in fantasy and science fiction. It was started as the official Elfwood social networking site in February 2002 by Henrik Wallin. Later on the project separated and became more like a sister site. The split became more tangible in 2007 when Elfwood's servers moved from Lysator, while Elftown's hardware remained there.
The community comprises mainly Elfwood users and other people interested in fantasy, science fiction, art or related subjects. Elftown has features such as diaries, a messaging system, a wiki, forums, guestbooks and user generated polls.
Elftown runs on small modern hardware bought by donations from its users, and is built on a unique software solution built on Roxen Webserver and Pike.
There is an application process to become a member of Elftown. People using netspeak may be locked out.
History
The original plan behind Elftown was to build a site based around software designed for building dating sites as a replacement for Elfwood’s LiveJournal community. The dating site software seemed to be far more adjustable to the running of discussion forums, the building of art galleries, and other things that interested the people of Elfwood. Elfwood had thought about using LysKOM as the software for its forums, but decided against it because many users found it too complicated. LysKOM was, however, a strong source of inspiration for the Elftown forums.
Later, a wiki was added. Elftown’s wiki is now about 20 GByte of text (mostly compressed). The wiki is filled mostly with Elftown’s members’ personal pages, galleries and chat-rooms, but there are also resources on fantasy and mythological creatures. Elftown now has functions for voting and poll creation, blogging, webpage-building (in the wiki), and a unique forum system.
In September 2004, approximately 14,000 users logged into the site, making it one of the biggest online communities in Sweden, and the third largest on Lysator. In February 2007 it had over 180,000 members. It has about 3000 unique visitors per day according to Google Trends.