I have hopefully made commenting work again.
SPAM is something that really bothers me, coming back from my
vacation and facing an inbox of 1500 messages of which 95% is spam
Just finished a complete backup of the main Elfwood files,
6941730 files if you count them 
. I will now rotate that disc
with one at home to always keep a backup copy of Elfwood off-site -
hopefully we will have no more data loss due to hard disc crashes in
the future. Did you notice the Annoucement board
page where we put up all kind of external announcements, like call
for artists, etc. Check it out. Elftown is currently being upgraded to a new monster
motherboard/cpu - let's hope Hedda manage to get all the
configurations right and that Elftown will be a speedy system... ...and on a more positive sidenote, I recently got engaged to
my girlfriend Anna! 
We have been very busy since the crash, and ever since we reopened the
queue for new tickets, they have been rushing in. We are quite behind
at the moment, roughly 1 month behind. We are sorry for the
inconvenience, but we ask that you please be patient. The moderators
are humans and have lives outside of Elfwood, and at the moment the
majority of the moderators aren't moderating because of real life
issues such as exams, holidays and even 2 are bringing new life into
the world (read: moderators to be eventually ;), and we also have new
moderators to train, which takes time off from the more experienced
moderators who have to train them.
Finally, Elfwood seems to be running nicely again *joy* A couple of my friends here in Linkoping have a cool Rock'n'Roll band with
strong comic super-hero influences. They've just released this new
record, "Five smell city" that's really cool :) Check it out!
Back online again after a few days off the air. The short
version; Lysator computer systems had intrusions by hackers and the
main Elfwood system hard disc drive crashed - more or less at the same
time. We've restored the system, we've upgraded it a lot and we have
installed a couple of new fresh hard discs - we're back and the system
is more modern, safer and faster than ever before. Enjoy!
The updated General Rules are now online. The rule clarifications were done by a combined effort of all moderators
and complied by Matt
Summers and Monica Christensen.
Things seems to have recovered pretty well from the crash and
soon all systems are running again. You may have noticed that nothing
new has been published at Elfwood recently, that should soon change
:-)
Major Crash at Elfwood
I just wanted to say an official "Thank you!" to Eliza who is
finally leaving her Elfwood responsibilities after many years of hard
work in the Elfwood management. Its been a pleasure to work with Eliza
and I wish her good luck on her new magazine and art sales! ps, on a more personal side note; I haven't been that active
myself at
Elfwood lately - personal business, taking a scuba diving certificate
(Yes, diving - Outdoors. In sweden. In minus nine degrees)
and planning my three week trip to Bali (9th feb) takes a lot of
time. (Ps, what to do one evening in Hong Kong? Any idea?)
We are still in need of more moderators, and we would prefer that members who haven't had anything rejected volunteer. See the requirements and info below. Also I've sent out tests to more than 40 people since December, which I haven't heard back from yet. I have heard back from a big bunch of people, but I still haven't heard back from more than 40. You must be at least 18 years old. You must be able to use IRC (a chat program) for training. You must be an Elfwood member. You must have a published account in the area you are volunteering for. You must have a good record, meaning no rejections for copying, rule-breaking art or stories etc. You must be willing to give at least 3-4 hours a week to moderating. You must have a good understanding of the rules. If you have all the requirements, then please proceed in reading the rest and volunteer. You're welcome to volunteer for more than 1 area. We will put up a note when we have enough volunteers, and all that have volunteered will hear back from us, but it might take a little while. We are in greatest need of moderators for FanQuarter, but we also seek more moderators in SF&F art and Wyverns. For FanQuarter: We prefer volunteers that are familiar with a number of anime and American comics.
John Bauers Museum are looking for knights! John Bauers Museum in
Jönköping, Sweden, has a large amount of original artworks
by John Bauer. In the summer of
2005 they will focus on his pictures of knights in an exhibition
called .En riddare red. (A knight went riding). They are now searching
for contemporary fantasy pictures of knights to be part of the
exhibition. Do you draw knights AND live in the southern part of
Sweden? Would you like your pictures to be part of the art exhibition?
Please contact: lena_lindgren@hotmail.com
Merry Christmas! (Swedes celebrate Christmas Eve.)
If you have all the requirements, then please proceed in reading the rest and volunteer. You're welcome to volunteer for more than 1 area. We will put up a note when we have enough volunteers, and all that have volunteered will hear back from us, but it might take a little while. We are in greatest need of moderators for FanQuarter, but we also seek more moderators in SF&F art and Wyverns. For FanQuarter: We prefer volunteers that are familiar with a
number of anime and American comics. We are currently looking for
volunteers who know their American comics like Marvel and others, but
we also need people who know their Dragon Ball, Inuyasha, Yu-Gi-Oh,
Fushigi Yuugi, Kenshin, Yu Yu Hakusho, Naruto, Gundam, Hellsing,
Sailor Moon and others. To contacts us please go to the "contact page" and make sure you put
which area you are volunteering for in the subject line, like
"FanQuarter mod", "Wyvern mod" or "SF&F mod". If you want to volunteer
for more than 1 area, just list them both like "FanQuarter and SF&F
mod".
With the background on the recent tragic events with Katy, I feel I
must say some words. First off, my deepest symphaties for everyone involved in
that affair, guilty or not, including her family. However, some
people have started to stab the Elfwood community in the back,
claiming it to be a safe haven for criminals. I've seen conspiracy
theories posted, for example by Rachel Baxter.
Missing girl found in San Francisco! Margaret Catherine "Katy"
Wilkerson, 14, and Paul Lance Cameron Bennett, the 22-year-old man
accused of kidnapping Katy a month ago, were apprehended without
incident at a San Francisco park. [More]
Well known author Anne McCaffrey is an inspiration to many fans. Up
until know, fan material based on her worlds has been explicitly
forbidden due to her hard restrictions. We're now happy announce that
thanks to her new, relaxed guidelines, we can accept Pern art into the
Art section based on her books if they follow her guidelines.
Her
guidelines. Oh, by the way, the November issue of WoodWorks
is now out!
Go read!
Margaret "Katy"
Wilkerson is missing; Anyone with information is asked to call the
League City Police Department at 281-332-2566..
Thanks to dedicated and hard work by
Matt Summers
we can finally present new and updated rules for
the Wyvern's Library. Matt hasn't invented any new
rules, but re-written them in a way that makes them
much easier to understand. All is wonderfully
adorned by cute illustrations by Michelle Mayo!
Seems like the daily email with comments are getting eaten and
chewed to something ...odd by hotmail right now. Sorry about
that, but I don't have a clue how to fix it, they are really nice
little emails with no HTML to start with...
Update: We now have enough volunteers at this time!
Bifrost Fantasy is Elfwood's first collaborative art club! We are
happy to unveil our new website design and would like to invite
Elfwood artists and writers, of all skill levels, to come and join us!
Please visit our website to find out more about our group. We hope to
be seeing you soon at www.bifrostfantasy.com!
The search engine is now covering all of Elfwood, there
was a problem with it before. It's also very well used, since I put it
back online a couple of weeks ago, it has had 1 350 000 search
requests!
Woodworks August is out!!
We've got quite a lot for you this month! The theme is Mysticism, and
we predict you've got many articles to read in the future.
[Read it!]
Yes, Elftown is down. Stop filling my artist guestbook with questions about
Elftown. Stop filling my mailbox with questions about Elftown. Instead
go to http://www.livejournal.com/~elftron/.
Yay! The search engine is (finally) back. This time on a new
server PC, running a new search software.
Things will be a little slow for a couple of days as I am
taking a full backup of all of Elfwood right now.
Elfwood has a new place to post your suggestions. You can find
it at Livejournal
ew_suggestions.
I got a big package today with gifts from the moderators as a
thank-you for running Elfwood and doing the merger earlier this
year. Wow, This sure made my day! Thanks to everyone!
Oh, I survived my mountain trekking trip too, and I'm now back
in business; here's the travel story
in swedish. (With lots of photos)
Elftown is still dead and down. Since there was some troubles
with the databases I daren't start it; let's wait until Hedda gets
back from his vacation to foreign countries. Sorry: I haven't had the time to process donations, so everyone
who donated: I just want to let you know that I got your donation but
I haven't registered it at Elfwood yet (badges, thanks-mail, etc) - I
also had all my emails deleted by a spyware removal tool (!) so I have
to backtrack donations through the logs and that is quite an effort
(will do) Smileys 
should 
work 
again
now! Fixed that bug... On Sunday I'm off for another "vacation" to the swedish
mountains (Sarek) for a ten day hard walk, living in a tent. I will trust
Mirar and Hedda to keep Elfwood alive. I can't be reached when I am
there, not even my mobile phone.
Well, Zino couldn't be more right. A powerloss due to
lightning caused Elftown to disappear. Since Hedda is travelling to
mysterious countries on the other side of the baltic sea, I had to
heal the PC and start it again. 
It's summer again. That means more lightning storms here
in Sweden, so if things go down just keep your fingers crossed and
wait for someone to replace whatever broke. Power fluctuations due to
lightning causing some part of elfwood to go down so far this year: 2
Updated: Tue Jun 22 13:07:30 CEST 2004
/Zino
Thu Jun 3 16:52:54 CEST 2004
Bifrost link removed - Mentioning Bifrost was a 'slashdot
effect' and the Geocities simply refused to show the page to most
visitors since they exceeded the bandwidth limit. We will plug it
later... :)
/Thomas
Tue May 11 19:07:27 CEST 2004
Lots of things to do for me right now at my ordinary job, as
the managing director for UserLane, a swedish usability
consultancy company... But I am rebuilding the "ewsearch" PC now from
scratch, so soon we will have a working search engine again.
Elftown was upgraded to
a brand new PC, improving the performance of our community a lot!
Details on the new hardware will soon be posted on our donations page!
/Thomas
Mon Apr 26 18:35:06 CEST 2004
Lot of things seem to crash and burn nowadays. Hedda finally managed to get Elfwood PC up and running again with a new power unit and the removal of one burned out CPU. Now we are running on just one CPU so expect things to be a little slow. So, now we're back after 9 days of downtime.
/Thomas
Sat Apr 17 17:28:30 CEST 2004
Planned downtime! Elfwood will probably be down tomorrow Sunday
between 07:00 and 13:00 CEST. That's Europeean time, 22:00 to 04:00
Los Angeles PDT, 15:00 to 21:00 Melbourne EST.
The reason is a power outtage during that time, and things are
shut down due to lack of cooling and power for so long. (Elfwood's UPS
is only good for half an hour, tops.) Elfwood may be down earlier and
get back up later then this, mind.
/Mirar
Mon Apr 12 08:22:54 CEST 2004
Woodworks April is out!
'How wide is the Band', 'Interview with Ursula Vernon', 'A Will of Their Own', 'Dream-Grafix.com', etc...
Announcing The Winners! - The Elfwood Beautification project contest is over and we congratulate all of our winners! [More...]
/Thomas
Thu Apr 8 07:39:15 CEST 2004
Wanted: Fan Quarter mods.
Prospective moderators must be at least 18 years old, have good record (no
rejections for copying etc...), and know a number of visual medias. We'd
prefer prospective mods to be very proficient in a number of anime. We are
currently looking for people who know their Inu Yasha, Yugi-oh, Fushigi
Yuugi, Kenshin, Yu Yu Hakusho, and Naruto. Of course we are
*always* looking for people who know their Gundam, Sailor Moon, and Dragon
Ball. Please keep in mind in applying that you need to be willing to give
at least three-five hours a week to the cause, and FanQ will be your top
priority.
To contact us please go to the contact page and make sure you put "Fan Quarter Mod" in the subject line.
/Eliza
Thu Apr 1 07:10:39 CEST 2004
Two students of Library- and Information Science from the University College of Boras, Sweden want your help. They are writing a master's thesis on indexing (= the assignment of keywords to a document) conducted by persons who are not professional indexers. They want to know how these persons go about when they put keywords on their works. Elfwood is such a database where the members/creators index their own artworks. They hope that You, as a member of Elfwood, will help them in their study by answering the questions in the questionnaire that they send you. Can you help them? Contact Maria at s026813@utb.hb.se or Emma at s026816@utb.hb.se
/Thomas
Tue Mar 30 12:41:48 CEST 2004
Elftown is down.
Update: Elftown is up.
/Zino
Fri Mar 26 15:14:30 CET 2004
The picture server is down again... unknown causes. Expect the site to ba a tad slow and some pictures to be missing for a while. :/
update 17:47: image server up again 
/Mirar
Sat Mar 13 07:02:17 CET 2004
Woodworks March is out!
Recipes for Fantasy Foods, Survival Guides, find out about generating ideas for your stories, Digital Art, and much more...
Mon Mar 1 22:08:29 CET 2004
The problems with the image servers should now be fixed by Hedda.
There is a new worm out there called netsky. It relies on users opening unknown attachements, but it's spreading very fast so it must be clever. Don't open any strange attachements.
It most likely uses one of the following reasons to click on the attachement:
"Your file is attached.",
"Please read the attached file.",
"Please have a look at the attached file.",
"See the attached file for details.",
"Here is the file." or
"Your document is attached.", but there are most probably other ways to trick innocent users.
/Mirar
Sun Feb 29 21:11:47 CET 2004
We're currently having some technical difficulties with the picture server. Some pictures are redirected to the main server, others just don't work. Please be patient. (And don't tell us about it, we know about it already. )
/Mirar
Sat Feb 28 20:29:12 CET 2004
Do you think the moderators are slow? Read this post by Gretchen over at Livejournal!
Time is running out for the contest, and I am so impressed by the quality and amount of art that we got!
/Thomas
Tue Feb 24 11:40:45 CET 2004
Elfwood's main page is produced by a script instead of calculated mainly by the server. Hopefully this will prove to solve the cache issues better.
/Mirar
Sat Feb 21 10:43:08 CET 2004
We have upgraded the web server to a new version (A leap from
version 1.3 to 3.3 of Roxen). This will give us a much more modern
programming environment and maybe some better http access
times. Unfortunately, the access counters had to be reset, so all
pages are back to 0 in the hit counters as of today.
Footnote: We had to step back to the version 1.3 after a few hours, the 3.3 ate huge amounts of RAM and was slow as an overweight whale without any fins after a while..
|
/Thomas |
/Mirar |
Contest! Current Theme: The Elfwood Beautification Project. It's looking pretty good so far, but some pages are a
little... plain. We need some new graphics to snazz the place up a
bit! There are ten different header decorations needed, and there will
be one winner for each category.
Fixing a lot of smaller and bigger bugs nowadays, things start to stablize after the merge now 
... Lost another 1500 zone47 accounts today - however, now I know WHY it happenned (a berzerking cleanup script) and how to restore them ("lost" accounts are in the cemetary of "purged" accounts, and can be restored..) Working on it... False alarm on the picture server problem described below; it works fine, it's just the Apache which can't log more items in the access log :-) It gets full... We have some technical problems with the Ewancient picture server at around 2-4 swedish time every night, i.e. prime time for U.S. web surfers. The machine simply stops responding when the load get too high - we're currently investigating WHY that happen.
It seems like we've lost a few Zone47 accounts - if you can't find your Zone47 account (log in to it, etc), contact us and we will try to restore it from a backup tape. We currently have no clue on WHY some accounts have gone missing - but the damage, atleast, seem to be quite limited. Thanks for all positive and negative feedback about the new layout. Some like it, some don't. We still have to weed out a few more bugs and problems before we open the Extranet for new art, again... After several days of hard work, Elfwood is now reopened with a new layout and design. Some may argue that the new look is better or worse, but one thing is for sure; it's much easier to navigate Elfwood now thanks to the new left menu. Zone47 is closed, and all members of that art area are asked to go use the Elfwood Extranet to merge or convert their science fiction art. Lot's of thanks to all who donated during the down time, I think I have to close Elfwood more often, it was atleast an economical success! The daily mod-choices will be back tomorrow! A new virus is rampaging right now. One would have thought everyone had learned not to open strange attachements by now...
Updates: You might wonder what the h*ck is going on right now behind the scenes at Elfwood, the ticket's being locked and all. Truth is that we've been preparing ourselves for the merge. The new-joins questionaries are updated and I have done some work on the new look of Elfwood. I have also been delayed by some personal stuff, but next week I will hopefully be able to open the new Elfwood (New look and No more Zone47) [More Info]. So, Expect Elfwood to be down for a day or two next week!
Upgrades: We've been improving the Elfwood server infrastructure a LOT recently. Details on our hardware investments can be found on our donations page, as usual. The PC called "Ewancient" now takes care of 100% of all picture requests. Since it's now a very powerful PC, and the main Elfwood server is released from these requests, all of Elfwood will be MUCH, much faster now! Oh, All our PCs are now moved to a 100mbit network connection too.
Woodworks January is out!
The Elfwood merge of the Fantasy and Scifi art sections "Lothlorien" and "Zone 47" is
getting closer. At the same time, I will also change the graphical
layout and navigation of Elfwood. I can't give you any date yet, but
be prepared (and take a few screenshots if you wish to remember how
Elfwood looked like in the old days)
Elftown had some recent down-time due to a broken northbridge
fan in the server. Spare parts are ordered, and I will also invest in
new, better cooled, PC chassis soon for three of our PC servers. After fixing a few bugs, the load sharing to the 'ewancient' PC
and web server works fine now. I think Elfwood should respond about
twice as fast now, since the ewancient server takes care of almost all
web accesses to picture files. 
Happy Holidays to all Elfwood members and visitors and may 2004 be your
brightest and happiest year yet! ...and from me too! As you can see, I havent yet merged
anything at Elfwood, I've been delayed for a couple of reasons. I've
managed to speed up Elfwood by splitting the load to the "ewancient"
server (causing a few broken galleries, that should soon be fixed,
sorry). Im also working on some other hobby projects that are delaying
me. Anyway, have a happy holiday - and don't forget to do some new
paintings or stories!
Lately we have been hearing some rumors that are being spread about
Elfwood, and Elfwood moderation. Like most rumors, they are based on false
information. Contrary to these rumors the moderators don't reject a
whole ticket if there is one picture breaking the rules. Nor do they
reject perfectly fine fantasy art. Only art that breaks the rules is
rejected. If you have a problem with a rejection all you have to do is to
reply to the rejection email and ask for a second opinion. I'm planning to
change the look of Elfwood in the near future. When I do that, I will
also join the Science Fiction and Fantasy art areas into one. It's
impossible to know where the exact border is, and it takes a lot of
time from the moderators. Expect Elfwood to be down for a day or two
in the (near?) future when I do this operation. I have seen many attempts to ruin and destroy Elfwood over the
90 months I have been running Elfwood. Yay! Meow! Today's my 4th birthday! (Hope I'll get plenty of boiled herring tonight!)
There is again a virus (worm) around, that might say something about account expiration and ask you to look at the attachement for details. Don't fall for it, even if it sends itself from what seems like an official Elfwood address!
Technically speaking, Elfwood seems to run smooth right now. We have (as always?) some
small problems with the search engine, but I am working on fixing these - it seems that certain
user accounts are never indexed. In the meantime, go read:
Woodworks October!
Let's all welcome our two new
FARP
editors to the Elfwood crew:
Yifat and
Adriane, who
will help
Michael to run
FARP.
Sounds interesting? Please
read more about writing for FARP!
Some plugs... We've had a brownout today, which ate it's way through the UPS, so Elfwood had to be restarted with all the fuss that means. Sorry about that, all should be up now again.
Woodworks September is out!
The search engine continues to work in mysterious ways, and I often have to manually re-start it to wake it up again. We would like to ask everyone who keeps emailing us about the search engine to STOP doing so. Our support crew is being overwhelmed with messages about the search engine. We are aware of the fact that it keeps dying and are working to find a better software solution...
With the help from Zino and Hedda, I have finally managed to get the Search engine back on track. There is currently a virus around, that might say something about account expiration and ask you to look at the attachement for details. Don't fall for it, even if it sends itself from what seems like an official Elfwood address.
As already mentioned, our search engine is currently
off-line. We are aware it's off-line, please do not email support
about it. Also, be sure to watch the News and Features Column on
Elfwood's main page for updates about the search engine. In the mean
time, why don't you give the Random buttons a try?
Okey, today I got around 1500 (!) mails with that Sobig.f virus. It's a bit much, so I suspect some of you might have it. Please upgrade your virus software and scan for it? =^.^=
I compacted all galleries again. I removed all empty spots and increased the number of artists in a gallery from 10 to 36 in Lothlorien, Zone 47 and Fanquarter. This means that Lothlorien now has about 495 galleries, for example.
Woodworks August is out!
Yes, the search engine is temporarly down again. Please, do not email
us any more about it - we're working on it.
6 new articles at FARP!-- Michael Liljenberg
FARP Editor
Scott Viviani happily thanks the Elfwood community for the help with the "Mountain Quest" freeware online fantasy board game that he just completed with the help of Elfwood artists. Check it out at http://mq.scotiva.com.
Hardware upgrade completed. After a few hours of hard work by me and Hedda, the servers are now upgraded. For details, see our donation page. Many, many thanks to everyone who has donated! We haven't got the dual-cpu's to run in dual-mode yet, but hopefully a new BIOS will solve that next week.
We will soon start upgrading our servers with new hardware. If Elfwood is down in the next days, you now know why.
We increased the size of allowed images at Elfwood art areas to 1000 x 1000 pixels and 250 kb in size.
Good news! We soon intend to invest in a new, better, server, and let the
current one (which is not-so-bad) be inherited by Elftown. New:Donations are now
also possible through PayPal! A change in our rules:
The search engine is back - we had a minor hardware failure. The last 30 days the 92 moderators of Elfwood has processed 13777 tickets (!). With summer vacations coming up, we've decided to let the moderators have a few weeks off. Thus, no new members or no new tickets (i.e. updates) will be processed for a while. However, some of us will try to go through the backlog of tickets (2727 tickets when I write this). Personally, I've taken care of some really old issues lately. Fixed the bug in the Extranet that caused modpick info to disappear for Wyvern library items. Perhaps worth checking out? "Dragon*Con 2003 Art Show" in Atlanta, GA from August 29 to Sept. 1, 2003. Searches...
Everything back up.
A lot of Elfwood artists seems to have gotten the Fizzer virus, since the virus bombardment in mail to Elfwood has increased
dramatically lately. Elfwood itself runs Linux and is untouched by the virus, so we're not worried about that, but please check if you got it. (Also read more about it. It's really nasty, turning off virus checkers...)
Woodworks May is out! Say hello to the Big Issue!
You can now take your questions directly to the Elfwood Moderators by
using IRC. Go to /server irc.esper.net 6667 and /join #Elfwood_help.
Moderators have an @ in front of their nick. We can't guarantee it
will be manned 24 hours, but we do try to have someone on at all
times. If no one is there, please use the Elfwood contact form to
contact us. OK, some more downtime today, as I installed the new system
disks I ordered recently. Soon we will start to transger the whole
server software to these, so expect some more downtime ...and
repeatedly. We decided to stop using one more SCSI disk, only the
needed system disk still operational now. Thomas ordered two IDE disks
to replace it today.
Elfwood crashed again, same error. Seems rather random when it crashes...
When it got back up, a file was ruined which prevented the extranet from booting. A bit of debugging there before I found the culprit, but it should be running again now.
I just wanted to thank all the 7916 persons who completed the
Elfwood survey we ran recently. I will, as promised, post a summary of
our findings soon on this site - for you to read! As you might have noticed, a new search engine
is in place. Loads of Thanks to Johan Schön who installed and fine
tuned it for us. The new search is fast as lightning and also updates it's
database on a regular basis.
And after a few days, as you noticed, Elfwood went down again yesterday evening. The iBoot remote powercycler went down too.
We regret to inform you that Woodworks has been closed down, pending suits from the TPA (Termite Protection Agency), RSPCA (Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals), LAWNS (l33ts Against Wasted Netspace).
Elfwood down again this weekend. We had forgotten to change a PC BIOS setting that stopped the machine from booting after a power loss (what use is a remote power switch then?). Mirar also has a clue on what might be the root problem...
...and again, and again. Too much to write of every occasion.
But now we got a remote-power-cycler so we can reboot it (or at least
cycle the power) from home.
...and loads of Thank-you's to everyone who has donated to Elfwood, it was you who financed it for Elfwood. No credits to Dataprobe.com however, they never even answered to my repeated emails when I asked if it was possible for them to consider some kind of discount for us...
The computer crashed again. At least we were faster in getting
it up today, thanks to Ceder who happened to pass the computer hall.
I bet this will never happen anymore when we can reboot it remotely...
The survey is going great so far. When I write this I have almost 6000 replies. This will sure help us to improve Elfwood... ...and improvements have already begun; FARP is finally moving forward again and a new search engine is evaluated. I will update you all with more news later...
Elfwood was down the whole weekend. We're sorry for
the inconveniences this may have caused. Our PC sometimes crashes, and
since it's locked up in a computer hall we can't access during the
weekends there's not much we can do about it. However, I have now
ordered a remote reboot power unit - so this scenario will not repeat
itself!
Wood There was some fuzz with the support/moderation emails, if you got a bounce trying to mail us the last days, please try again.
Ever wondered why your
Fanquarter
ticket takes so long time? It can take over two weeks as it is today.
This is mainly because many artists tries to upload copies,
traced artwork off some other artist, the original or fanart.
Now, this wouldn't be a problem, but we're kind of hard to our moderators and demand that they at least try to find the original artwork before they reject something as a copy. Since many artists seems to think that fanart equals copy, many tickets contain lots of copied artwork.
Tracing down the images it's copied from takes a lot of time, for instance, browsing through half a movie or googling for hours, sometimes with several moderators involved.
This of course takes time from other moderator duties. So that's why the fanquarter queue is so long. It's also not very enjoyable, rejecting ticket upon ticket.
Would these people who upload
copies please stop uploading copies? It's not like they aren't
spotted.
/Mirar
Sat Mar 1 19:48:28 CET 2003
I have rewritten the
guided tour system. Hopefully
this total rewrite will stop the old funny bugs
that haunted us. Enjoy!
(Unfortunately the database was pretty messed up, but
contact us
if your tour can't seem to be refound.)
/Mirar
Tue Mar 4 07:41:43 CET 2003
A small note about a non profit The Faerieworlds Festival, to be held Sat., May 10, in Sedona, AZ, USA. Check it out.
/Thomas
Tue Feb 18 20:17:49 CET 2003
Finally, mod pick's for writers too!
1 year Anniversary for the Ticket system at the Extranet! (*horray!*)
/Thomas
Sun Feb 16 09:06:45 CET 2003
(Updated Feb 20) Thank you to everyone who volunteered to help
FanQuarter! We have enough volunteers for now! If you haven't heard
from us yet, you will soon.
/Nico
Wed Feb 12 12:18:41 CET 2003
Our main server crashed yesterday. We're still not sure
what happened. At least both servers are up again now, thanks to Zino.
Woodworks February is here. Go check it out!
/Mirar
Mon Feb 10 19:22:35 CET 2003
Our search engine PC seems to have crashed. We will try to restart it asap. Use google in the meantime, see the new link on the Elfwood front page!
/Thomas
Sun Jan 26 12:42:00 CET 2003
I compressed all galleries in Lothlorien, removing empty
spots left over by users who have left Elfwood for various resons.
This means that your gallery number has changed - you are now much closer to the
front! But your URL is still the same. Be grateful :-)
/Thomas
Tue Feb 18 07:56:23 CET 2003
I finally got around to create a Moderators Choice for our
Writers at Elfwood! Enjoy!
/Thomas
Mon Jan 20 11:05:42 CET 2003
Some hard disk drive problems caused the Elfwood server to stop
working last evening. This morning, I rebooted it and unplugged the
faulty drive and we're up and running again. It was an old drive with
nothing vital on it, so nothing is lost (I hope )
A small coding error I made this weekend erronously caused a lot of
newly uploaded pictures to be marked with a "mod's pick" icon. I will remove
all faulty icons a.s.a.p - sorry to all who jumped in joy at getting chosen
as "mod's pick" when they weren't...
/Thomas
Sun Jan 19 10:05:17 CET 2003
Elfwood is up again. Thomas moved the hardware to a new case, better
suited for server use. Some fuzz made it take longer then was planned
from the start (I guess you noticed that).
We now use an ATA RAID for the user files instead of the SCSI
disks. Linux software RAID level 5 on 4 120Gb IBM 180GXP disks, in
case anyone wants the tech specs.
Appearantly, the search engine machine accidently got disconnected. Hopefully someone will get to the computer hall soon to fix it.
. In
celebration, this issue is dedicated to wizards, hobbits, elves, heroes,
magic, and high adventure. Oh, and Merry Christmas from all the the
staff!
Elftown, a Elfwood community for and by Elfwooders, is up and running since half a year. But now it needs more inspiration, more art, more suggestion, more testing or, in two words, more members. Anyone can register, so grabb your favorite nick before it become taken!
I just suspended 1549 accounts due to non-working email adresses.
I have finally found some time to implement a simple script
that check that the email addresses of the Elfwood members are working. ERB rule pages are updated and revamped. Here's September: All published Elfwood Survival Guides can now be found at FARP: Too many tickets and too little time and moderators - Now we've
put a limit at 2500 tickets; If we go beyond that, we will not accept
any new ones. I've also implemented a way of auto-accepting tickets
by trusted members (Who have a good record, yep, we keep track of all
accept and rejects) and moderators themselves.
Road Runner isn't accepting mail from Elfwood. We've
tried to contact them, but they didn't even bother to
answer. Don't try to use a rr.com mail address, it will not
work. Don't forget to check out the Woodworks November issue.
OK, Me and Mirar tried to merge the access counters on artist pages. There was
two counters; one for /thomas/ and one for /thomas/thomas.html. Hope it works. One
will loose one of them, but it will be a better result anyway...
Thanks to Gette, the FARP
now is better structured and looks nicer. Unfortunately, she has resigned from her
duties as the FARP editor, which means I'm personally back into that position...
Don't miss the Elfwood survival guides for the world!
The ERB report form has closed. Bascially, this is due to lack of people who want
to work with the tough and ungrateful ERB duties. If we ever manage to restore the ERB to it's
former glory, we might re-open the form.
Elfwood just rebooted unexpectedly, it seems all the computer hall
rebooted, probably because of a power loss. Which is funny, since
Elfwood has an UPS now... Some minutes downtime while I check
the disks for errors.
Some files seems corrupted, but the file system is ok.
If you lost stuff uploaded the last hours, this is probably why. (I seem
to have lost a ticket about a me.jpg. Please write support again about
it...)
The "nightscript" was interrupted by the crash, so some
daily event didn't work out as they should. The "moderators choice"
isn't updated, don't know about the "featured members", and the
"random" lists are broken. But that'll be fixed within a few hours...
