An Interview with Rivka

-Why did you create CoE?
At the time that FotR came out, I was sort of marginally aware of the movie. In the past, I had started to read the books a few times, but never got very far with them, so I didn’t really have a clue what the movies would be about. But I really like fantasy, so I figured it would be an okay movie, and my hubbie and I managed to see it in the first week it was out. Well, that did it. As soon as the movie was over, I couldn’t stop talking about it, and as has happened in the past, my obsession lead me to start thinking about creating a fan site devoted to it (I very nearly created a Pirates of the Caribbean fan site recently, but held myself back). At the same time this happened, I was really getting into PHP programming, and I figured a new fan site would be a really good way for me to learn more PHP and database skills. So I gathered together a few friends that I had made on other sites, bought a domain name, and started building the site. Ultimately, for me, the reasons why I build any fan site include the following: a desire to share and discuss my newfound obsession with others, as well as having a platform for me to experiment with new website technology. And CoE has given both of those to me in spades.

-Are you surprised at how many members you have now?
Oh, definitely. One of my earlier fan sites, The Danger Room, had a pretty decent membership of 1000 members, and I thought I was doing pretty well with that at the time. That site helped teach me some of the basics of building up the membership, fostering a community, and advertising. During the first year of CoE, we actually stayed pretty small, no more than 2000 or so members, but we made an active push during that year to get our name out there through word of mouth and link exchanges. As our content started to grow, so did the membership, and they began to tell their friends, and link to us on their sites, until suddenly, we started to grow at a massive rate, and have continued to do so. I’m still amazed to look at our membership list and see how many people are signed up — admittedly, some of those memberships are duplicates, or people who only logged in once or never, but if you look at how many people are on during the day, it shows that our active membership is quite high, compared to several other sites — which is rather overwhelming if I think about it too much 🙂

-Do you expect to see any major changes after ROTK (such as more joining or members losing interest)?
Here’s what I predict will happen: the first few weeks after RotK comes out will be a little crazy, like it was last year, because a lot of people will suddenly rekindle (or find anew) interest in the books and movies, and want to find information or sites about them. So we’ll probably see a big surge at that time. But then, as the movies are over, people’s interests will begin to wane, and the people who were only kind of interested in it, or who visited only because they thought Orlando Bloom was hot, will move onto something new. I expect that a year from now, we’ll have a smallish core base of members, who are mostly interested in the books, the languages, and in intensive discussion of Tolkien’s works.

-What do you think is the best part recently added to the site?
Hmm, that’s tough to say — I love all parts of the site 🙂 But I’d have to say that the Humor Section has greatly impressed me…it started out with basically nothing, and has grown very rapidly over the short time period that it’s been up and running. Trignifty and Ringhilwen have great senses of humor, and they are constantly working to ensure that new stuff is added to that section.

-Do you have any plans to make Lavender Eyes more like CoE? (Games, RP, etc.)
Wow, someone actually visits that site! 🙂 LE is sort of my bastard step-child, in that I pay no attention to it, and let it run itself. Smith, who is my one and only staff person, oversees things in my absence, and does a great job at it. We have discussed adding an RPG forum in the past, but that would require hiring more staff…something I hope to see to soon. As far as games go, again, we’d have to have a staff person to oversee that kind of stuff. So, in the short term, the answer is, no, there are no major plans for LE, but maybe someday.

-What’s your favorite section of the site?
I don’t want any of the staff to get mad at me for not mentioning their section, LOL. I do enjoy all sections of the site, but the ones that I personally spend any major amount of time on are the Forums, and the Journals. I always try to read our News on the front page, too.

-Was it your idea or someone else’s to have the Language section of the site?
It’s hard to recall how exactly that fell into place, because it was nearly two years ago, but as I recall, Gildor-Inglorian was a member of the site, and was answering Elvish questions in the forum for people. I talked to him about it, and one of us suggested that we have actual Elvish lessons to be created by him. He did a great job with the lessons, and still helps in the Elvish 101 forum.

-And are you studying one of the Elven languages?
Nope. I’ve never been very good with languages, and just barely survived my required German classes for college. I wouldn’t want to put myself through the misery of trying to learn another language…

-How much time do you spend on CoE?
CoE is literally the first thing I load in Internet Explorer every morning when I turn on the computer, and it’s the last thing I shut down. I keep it running in the background all day, if possible, and I check it constantly while I work on other things. As for how much active time I spend on the site, probably a few hours every day, at least. That includes reading the staff forums, the journals, my PMs, dealing with problem members, and anything else that catches my eye. I also try to include in that time any things that I’m working on in my task list, such as new modules, fixing bugs, and anything else that my staff has come up with for me to work on.

-Now that you have had the time to both read the books and experience two parts of the Trilogy on screen what do you think of PJ’s interpretation of the story?
I think when he sticks to the books, or even fleshes things out that are only briefly mentioned in the books, he does very well. He almost always brings to life the scenes and characters that I pictured when I read the books. The things that I have a problem with are when he completely makes things up for no apparent reason. Case in point: Aragorn falling off the cliff after the Warg battle in TTT. It wasn’t in the book, and served pretty much no purpose. It also cut into time that would have been better spent on other scenes that were based on the book. I’m all for interpreting Tolkien’s work, and adding new twists to it, but adding completely new scenes really irks me. I hope PJ lays off on doing that in RotK.

-Has reading Tolkien led you to read any other authors of this genre, if yes, how do they stack up against Tolkien in your mind?
I’ve actually read fantasy for years, starting at an early age with C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series, and Tolkien’s Hobbit (which I loved as a kid, and reread several times). Because I had never read Lord of the Rings, I never realized how much of the fantasy I read as a teen were a derivative of his works — the Shannara series comes immediately to mind. It’s a book that I enjoyed immensely when I was younger, but when I tried rereading it recently, it was painful. The writing was very poor, and ripped off far too many of Tolkien’s ideas. I am on a constant quest, actually, to find good fantasy literature. Stuff that is well written, not clichéd or copied off of Tolkien, with rich characters and detailed worlds, that don’t portray women as either Mary Sues or sexual objects. To be honest, I haven’t had much success, because nearly every series I’ve read fails with one or more of those aspects. The few series that come immediately to mind as being enjoyable, without too much to annoy me are: The Deed of Paksenarrion, by Elizabeth Moon (the first book is tough going, but the latter two make it worth it), The Last Herald Mage series by Mercedes Lackey (her writing is somewhat trite sometimes, and her characters can be whiny, but I still like this series), and the Dark Elf trilogy by R.A. Salvatore (I’ve loved this series for a while. The Icewind Dale trilogy suffers from Tolkienitis, but the Dark Elf trilogy is unique and fascinating). And probably the best fantasy series that I’ve read in a very long time is George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series — it’s very adult in concept and scope, but very well written.
I enjoy reading all of these books, but they are all very different from Tolkien’s work — the Lord of the Rings almost reads like a history book. In some ways it’s very dry, and contains a lot of dated sentiments and concepts (the master-servant relationship, for example, seen between Sam and Frodo). To modern sensibilities, it’s not an easy read. But I don’t think that takes away from the brilliance of his ideas or his writing, and the fact that he’s the one who basically started the fantasy genre — Tolkien is what kids will be reading in school and writing English papers on 50 years from now (if they’re not already). For these other writers, I don’t think that’s very likely to happen.

-What did CoE start with?
The structure of CoE has always been basically what you see now, with a main menu on the left, news on the front page, and a poll in the right-hand corner. The first sections of the site were the Gallery, Forum, Downloads, and Links section. As time has passed, we’ve added new sections to the site that are linked off of the main menu. The first staff members included myself, Hermitt, M, and Hobbitfriend. As time passed, and the site grew, we started adding forum moderators, and then admins to oversee specific sections of the site, until it grew to what you see today.

-What do you have for CoE in the future?
We’ve got a few things in the works right now: a Tours section that will walk you through the different places of the books, with illustrations and quotations. A Books vs. Movies area that will describe in great detail the differences between the two. And I’m hoping to get the Pick-Your-Path story section going, if I can get some good outlines from people. All of the current sections of the site will continue to add content to their areas, of course. In addition, our main goal with the site over the next few months is to turn the focus from the movies towards the books, so we’re doing everything we can to build up the Elrond’s Library section of the site. We’re always open to suggestions or ideas, so please be sure to pass any ideas on for what you’d like to see on the site, and if it’s possible, I’ll try to implement them.

-This is kind of a silly question, but…if you are member number two, who is number one?
I get this all the time 🙂 The software that runs our site, called Postnuke, comes with a default member automatically installed when you install the software — this member is known as “Anonymous.” Every time someone writes a comment in the news, and they aren’t logged in, it’s attributed to this Anonymous member 🙂

-What suggestions would you give to beginners who want to start their own site?
Make sure you have a lot of free time to devote to it. You’ll also need webhosting space, so you’ll have to investigate webhosts, and learn the relevant terminology. Unless it’s a very small site, you’ll need money to pay for that host and the bandwidth. You have to know at least HTML, and it helps if you know a dynamic scripting language like PHP or ASP. Basic image skills are necessary as well. You need to be a people person, and be able to interact diplomatically with your staff and site members, or else you’re likely to turn people off of your site.
Start small if it’s your first site — focus the site on a specific character that you like, for example. You can’t expect to create your first site and have it be like CoE — it wasn’t my first site, and I learned the basics on other sites that I created. People usually go to fan sites for one of three reasons: 1) to find other people to discuss their obsession with, so you must fulfill that need by having forums, and/or a chat room, 2) to find information — that means you must have content on your site that fulfills that need, such as news, scripts, encyclopedias, and so on, 3) to amuse themselves — that means games, fanfiction, images. My usual advice to someone just starting out with their first fan site, is to pick one of those aspects and focus specifically on it. It’s a lot easier to manage and can help fill a niche within the fandom community if it’s done well. If you find you can handle that easily, then start adding on other aspects to your site, one at a time. But don’t start out thinking that you’re going to build the next huge mega-site devoted to your favorite thing, because unless you’ve done it before, you’ll probably find yourself quickly overwhelmed by everything that needs to be done to keep it going.
I’m actually working on a site right now, located at fansitetools.com that will be targeted specifically towards fansite owners and admins — it will include a detailed manual on starting your own site, as well links to useful downloads, scripts, etc. And of course, a forum to ask questions 🙂 It’ll likely be several months until its ready, but keep your eyes open for it.

-What theme do you use and why?
I use Argonath. Why? Because it’s the only theme that I really had a hand in making (I picked the colors), and I like the soothing blues.

-Just wanted to say this too….this site rocks!!!!!
Thanks 🙂

Compiled by the Realm of Ulmo