therfiles

One year ago today, JKHub was officially opened to the JKA community! For one year, we've seen mods been created, clans form, and the entire JKA community rejuvenated. So today, lets celebrate one year of awesomeness and all we've accomplished to keep this amazing game alive! Statistics (these are right 60% of the time, all of the time) First off, lets see some stats: As you can see, JKHub has gained quite the user base, and we've gained quite a few new members to our community! You guys talk. A lot. Thank for keeping JKHub alive and abuzz with the latest developments on the JKA modding scene! Here is JKHub's traffic over the last couple days. As you can see, we got a lot of people who come to JKHub. And then there's those guys in red. No one likes you. Go home. Here is a chart'o'pies. As you can see, this gives us a clear (and tasty) picture of how much attention we get...in a week. And these are the top creepers of JKHub. Keep creep'n. Cael returns from the shadows Okay, so for this awesome day, we've asked Caelum, the founder of JKHub, to answer some questions for us. Big props to Cael for answering my frantic email with complete sanity. Therfiles: Thanks for returning to answer some questions! Therfiles: What inspired you to create JKHub? Caelum: If I'm very honest, being fed up with JKFiles. I thought JKHub would be a really neat website to have around, that I very much intended to set up, but if it had not been for the broken state of JKFiles, I might've only created JKHub years later, if at all. Before setting up JKHub, I wrote reviews at JKFiles for a short while, and became more and more annoyed at its complete and utter brokenness. To add to that, the GameFront and LucasForums are hardly an ideal forum to discuss JKA things specifically, and a lot of things, like tutorials, and news relating specifically to the JKA community, were only available spread out over bazillions of obscure websites, if they were even available at all. Therfiles: Can you tell us about the process of creating JKHub? Caelum: Originally, JKHub started as a vague idea I had, which I proposed to a number of friends, who all told me it was ridiculous and would never work, because it had never worked in the past. I ended up going through with it anyway, mostly because I felt like I would regret it if I didn't. It took almost a full year of preparations, which involved anything from creating the website style to reaching out to clans and modders. Of course, my luck being the way it is, the site went down for about two hours within 48 hours of launch through no fault of ours anyway, but other than that, everything had been prepared very thoroughly, and went very smoothly. Therfiles: Obviously, JKHub didn't start out perfect. What are some challenges you faced when first creating JKHub? Caelum: I struggled a lot with finding the motivation to set it up, as my motivation tends to vary wildly from day to day. I couldn't possibly list all the challenges involved, but by far the worst one was people who told me it couldn't be done: throughout all of JKHub's life, I've been bombarded with people telling me that either the project would not get off the ground and would never work, or, once it worked, that it was dying and would be gone very soon. Therfiles: Before JKHub, the community was really begginning to stall, leaving many to wonder what went wrong. What did you think the JKA community was lacking before JKHub? Caelum: A central website for JKA stuff, really; pretty much the features I set up at JKHub. There was JKFiles, but it was broken as all hell. There was GameFront and Lucasforums for forums, but neither focus exclusively on JKA. For news regarding the community, there was simply nothing at all. The list goes on. I basically thought the JKA community was lacking everything JKHub offered. Therfiles: What is your favorite thing about JKHub? Caelum: I don't know. Therfiles: How were you involved with JKA before setting up the Hub? Caelum: Way, way back, in 2006, I was a member (and at some point council member and co-leader) at JAWA. Some time after that, I created my first clan, SR, which I spent two years on. After I disbanded it, I created Cosmos, which I then spent another two years on. I still talk to a lot of people people from that clan regularly, despite my retirement from JKA and generally running far away from all things JKA-related. Aside from that, as said, I spent a short while working as a reviewer at JKFiles. Which, frankly, I blame on Averus Retruthan. Therfiles: Which is your favorite game from the JK series? Caelum: Definitely JKA, at least for its multiplayer. Truthfully, I only ever played JK2 SP, and it's been too long since I played it to remember much of it. Most other JK series games I haven't played at all. Therfiles: What evil scheme are you working on now. Caelum: I'm currently working on a particularly grotesque and ridiculous project: setting up my own (paid) web hosting company. It's really a huge project, which I'm pouring all of my savings, and a lot of effort into. Aside from that, I spend much of my time rambling to the poor people on various instant messengers about my rapidly declining sanity, playing lots of different games that do not involve Star Wars, and plotting to take over the world using a vast army of mind-controlled ants. Therfiles: Can we get an update on your web hosting business? Caelum: I've been working on it a lot. At the moment, the design for the website is getting somewhere, but not done yet. All technical aspects - such as server specs, software stack, and so forth, are all sorted. A lot of legalese still needs to be figured out as well. I'm hoping, and expecting, to launch officially at some point before the end of the year. I won't make any promises though. Like JKHub, it'll be launched when it's ready™ What I can say - although I may be just a little biased - is that it is going to turn out absolutely, absurdly awesomely. Therfiles: What are your future plans? Caelum: Staying alive. Global domination. Hugging people. Receiving a sufficient income from web hosting to live off semi-comfortably. Maybe creating a game, a visual novel, or both at some point in the coming years, if I get the web hosting working. Whatever sounds enjoyable, really. Therfiles: What is your favorite JKHub related moment? Caelum: Easily the 2012 JKHub Secret Santa. It was one of the most stressful, rewarding, and fun JKHub-related things I've done. You can read more about it here, here, and here. Therfiles: What was your biggest JKHub related achievement? Caelum: Successful retirement. Therfiles: What are some of the extra security...things that you put into JKHub? Caelum: I could write a several page essay about this. I am a paranoid man. Therfiles: Thanks so much Cael for answering these questions. You've created something truly amazing here. Thanks for all your hard work! On a side note...what ever happened to this? That's it. Go home. Thank you very very much to everyone in the JKHub community. You guys really make this place work, we just make it look pretty. Happy Birthday, and here's to another year! No really. Go home.