What is Darkfang?
It's a house name. The name itself is completely meaningless.
Does Darkfang have an affiliation with anything?
Not really.
Who runs this place?
Mikh'to designed and built this site and database and does most of the database gathering, with large contributions from other people.
kiilas assists with hosting and server-side stuff and various friends that help make various decisions and give feedback initially, then other people are free to give feedback and ideas when it goes public.
Why did you make this site?
Because we felt that we could make something other people haven't, and that we could replace other good resource sites that are essentially derelict or dead. There are active webrings and link lists, etc. but we feel like what a lot of things lack is curation and research. Also, none of them have the benefit of metadata and cataloging that this site does.
There are also lists of IRC channels, mailing lists, etc. but they're static, can be clunky and they don't say if they're still alive or active or not.
We also wanted to create a place that maintained particular views on these subjects that hadn't been lately (especially with regards to Mythic Otherkin), and to make clarifications of certain subjects that have been influenced by unecessary dogmatic notions.
This site is meant to be an efficient starting point. The information is richly organised and well-presented, and for admins, editing or adding data is easy because it's dynamically generated from a database. In the future, we would like to see if we can make this website a more comprehensive archive, but for now, starting points is what is being focused on.
How do you decide what gets added?
With social spaces, it comes to these factors:
- It doesn't have any specific inclination to cause harm or mislead.
- It serves as a place of conversation or interaction for any group of people this site covers. It doesn't have to be the main point of the place, just that they specifically allow such people and interactions.
With sites and media, it has to meet these criteria:
- It has to exist or be online somewhere (if you have a site that is or will no longer be around and you would like this site to mirror it, let me know :3)
- It doesn't have any specific inclination to cause harm or mislead
- It has useful, interesting, entertaining or thoughtful things on it for whatever group of people this site covers.
We intentionally make the list short for media; not only is logging all the writings on this subject a unrealistically large task, but it would overload our ability to process it. This site is also currently about providing starting points, so we just choose highlights.
Sometimes if a site or media item is misleading in some capacity, but not necessarily intentionally, or still has information that would be of use to certain groups of people regardless, usually we will just publish those with a notice clarifying the inaccuracies.
How do you determine the activity of a social space?
Each social space's status has certain criteria for it, which will be eventually explained in an info page. These are very approximate, and they're just designed so that people can get a feel before checking the place out. The key is designed to indicate how likely people are going to be responded to or able to start a conversation.
Most online groups have some form of public posts, where it is relatively easy to guage how busy they are or not at the moment. Most mailing lists use Yahoo Groups, which has a public display of activity throughout a mailing list's history.
For chat rooms, Mikh'to checks the place every few months, by connecting to it (either as 'mikhto' or 'Mikh'to') and checking it out for at least a week.
Any social space marked as 'unknown' simply means that the admins couldn't get information about the place's activity in some way. 'Dead' means that the online location no longer exists.These things are dangerous / offensive / stupid / whatever and you shouldn't be supporting them.
As the Elfinkind Digest says, everyone has heard it before, and everyone doesn't need to hear it again. You trying to exert what you think or believe about this isn't going to do anything.
Will you be adding info on Fictives or Phytanthropes (Plantkin)?
Maybe in the future. We want to at least make sure this database is solid first for the categories that are there, and make sure this database scales well.
We are also currently unsure about our ability to be able to sufficiently support topics like that with curated content given the number of topics this site already covers.
Will you be adding more info on Multiplicity in the future?
Unlikely, unless we stumble across it like we have with the information currently on this site.
Will you be adding Facebook or Google+ Groups?
Maybe in the future. Facebook and Google creep us out. If we do it, we'll have to make extra provisions for researching them.
AnOtherWiki covers Facebook and Google+ groups.
X item of information is wrong.
All the items in the database are pre-checked, but we could be wrong. Keep in mind that none of this information has any *one* truth to it, so if you're in disagreement with someone's opinion, that's not going to make us pull it. If you think that something is genuinely misleading, incorrect or problematic, drop us a message about it.
