ElWiki Owner Conversation on June 25 2006

The following is an IM discussion with the owner of the ElWiki service on June 25, 2006. Keep in mind, he's in the United Kingdom, so references to times were adjusted to his zone.

[17:55] Lilithia: Ya ha! Hello! How are you, tonight?

[18:05] Lilithia: Are you okay over there?

[18:08] ElWiki Owner: hi

[18:08] Lilithia: Hehe, hello. Sorry to intrude like this. If you're available, mind if I make a pest out of myself for a few minutes?

[18:09] ElWiki Owner: heh... I'm intrigued

[18:09] ElWiki Owner: go ahead :p

[18:09] Lilithia: Hehe, all righty. First off, I just wanted to say that I looked over your website, and... wow. You are a pretty busy person.

[18:10] Lilithia: Are you enjoying being out of university? Or, did I read that wrong?

[18:11] ElWiki Owner: I finished my degree a couple of weeks ago

[18:11] ElWiki Owner: so yeah, getting used to my freedom from a timetable :p

[18:12] Lilithia: Hah! Oh, wow. I can't wait for the same thing, myself. I have another year to go, and then I'll be in your position. Can't wait.... Oh, I already know your name. My name is. :D

[18:13] Lilithia: Seems only fair to give you equal blackmail power.

[18:13] ElWiki Owner: heh

[18:13] ElWiki Owner: so, how did you stuble accross my site?

[18:14] Lilithia: Well, not easily. :P I have a wiki under your(?) ElWiki project, and I found the SPV Developers site, then your profile there in the forums, and then... well, here we are.

[18:15] ElWiki Owner: ahh, I see :p

[18:15] Lilithia: Hehe, yeah. A little bit of child-level investigative work.

[18:16] Lilithia: We've been loving the ElWiki program. I'm the 'administrator' of http:earthenring.elwiki.com

[18:16] Lilithia: Errr... (Link: http://earthenring.elwiki.com)http://earthenring.elwiki.com

[18:17] ElWiki Owner: I see, kewl

[18:18] Lilithia: Hehe, yeah! It's been booming. We had a couple thousand page hits on the first day, and when it was exploding we had around 20 or more pages made per day.

[18:19] Lilithia: We've been using it as a resource for our community in World of Warcraft, and believe me... we needed it.

[18:21] Lilithia: We've had a lot of player-created content uploaded on there, and it should help really flesh out the community.

[18:22] ElWiki Owner: nice to know you found ElWiki useful :)

[18:22] Lilithia: Thanks! And thank you for providing it. However, I do have a few questions to ask you, if that's all right.

[18:23] ElWiki Owner: sure

[18:24] Lilithia: All righty. Until this morning, the wiki was... dead. Very dead for two days. We were unable to access any pages, and the thing just kind of... didn't exist. What happened?

[18:26] ElWiki Owner: very sorry about that - Apache (the web server running it) just stopped working - the config file got corrupted and it took me a while to fix it

[18:27] ElWiki Owner: it should be all back to normal, although for the next few hours there may be intermittent glitches as I'm pruning all the unused sites (lots of people signed up for an account but never used it, and the unused accounts are wasting server resources and slowing things down).

[18:27] Lilithia: Ooooooh... okay. We had no idea about anything that happened with it. And after the small outage around Sunday of last week, we were afraid the service was going to be shut down, or was experiencing some sort of horrible, long-term techincal problem.

[18:28] ElWiki Owner: Nothing that bad - I have no intention of shutting the service, and certainly wouldn't consider doing it without providing plenty of notice and letting people make backups of their sites. In terms of technical problems - I don't expect any to be long term...

[18:30] Lilithia: Oh, that's absolutely great. As you can imagine, the wiki team has been going wild trying to make contingencies, thinking the thing may have been down for good. Is there any sort of mailing list for this sort of thing?

[18:33] ElWiki Owner: I'm in the proccess of making some changes - the number of new signups has grown quite rapidly since January. That's nice on one hand, however it means I'm getting flooded with email questions. I'm in the middle of writing a control panel which will automate some command tasks such as letting users change logos/skins/permissions, etc. That'll mean I can automate 99% of the requests I get, and let me concentrate on the 1% of unique ones.

[18:33] ElWiki Owner: As part of the control panel, there'll be an option for users to make backups of their sites, and an option for me to easilly broadcast an email to all registered users, which will hopefully give everyone more peace of mind in case of downtime.

[18:36] Lilithia: Wow... okay. I'm really liking that. As we were trying to make the wiki, we noticed that backup was going to be very painful for us. We've also been wanting to customize the site a little more for the community, and change the permissions to where only logged-in users can edit or create. A control panel would be wonderful, and take care of a lot of our problems (not to mention, ease some minds). I don't mean to rush you, but when do you think that will be in a beta stage?

[18:40] ElWiki Owner: hopefully less than a week

[18:40] ElWiki Owner: I'll make sure you're the first to know when it's ready for beta testing :p

[18:41] Lilithia: Oooooh, wow. Really, I can't begin to tell you how happy that makes me. When we have this in full swing, we expect hundreds of members.

[18:41] Lilithia: The community itself is composed of thousands, and we hope to get as broad an audience as possible.

[18:44] Lilithia: Really, hearing all of this is great. The wiki has begun to mean a lot to our community. You've really created something great, here.

[18:46] Lilithia: Before I go, just one last thing.: How can we help?

[18:47] Lilithia: If we're going to be sucking down so many resources, we may as well see what we can do to help you.

[18:51] ElWiki Owner: Don't worry about it... the project doesn't need much help right now.

[18:51] ElWiki Owner: and when I finish the control panel, it should make running it a lot easier

[18:52] Lilithia: Okay. Well, if you do need anything, you have a community of people that is willing to give whatever they can to help out. ;D

[18:52] ElWiki Owner: great, thanks for the offer :)

[18:52] Lilithia: I have to run for now, but thank you for your time once more,. This has really set us at ease. Thanks again for the ElWiki!

[18:53] Lilithia: I'll try not to bother you too much in the future. :D

[18:53] ElWiki Owner: heh, it's no problem

[18:53] Lilithia: See you later! Sleep well!