ElaKiri, also known as ElaKiri.com is a
virtual collaborative community which is aimed at creating a platform for members to
share knowledge covering a large number of topics. Primarily for the convenience of members, these topics have been categorized under different
forums. Members are required to ask questions, answer other users' questions and share their knowledge in the specific forums that have been designated. Under each forum heading, the topics in discussion are sub-categorized into
"threads", each consisting of a series of messages followed by a main topic. United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) Information Economy Report identified ElaKiri.com as one of the most popular sites in Sri Lanka and indication of the ICT growth in the country.
About ElaKiri
ElaKiri's membership base is largely concentrated on Sri Lankan users, including a large number of
Sri Lankans
This is a demography of the population of Sri Lanka including population density, ethnicity, education level, health of the populace, economic status, religious affiliations and other aspects of the population.
Sri Lanka is an island in the ...
living abroad. Site guidelines are influenced mainly by Sri Lankan cultural values, as such any violation of these guidelines may lead to automatic cancellation of one's membership. The site allows any user to open an account upon presenting a valid email address. To encourage active participation, ElaKiri recognizes its members with various levels of seniority depending on the number of posts that each user has made. Users are allowed to use
Sinhala or English languages to
post
Post or POST commonly refers to:
*Mail, the postal system, especially in Commonwealth of Nations countries
**An Post, the Irish national postal service
**Canada Post, Canadian postal service
**Deutsche Post, German postal service
**Iraqi Post, Ira ...
in
threads. ElaKiri.com was registered on 16 March 2004 and Beta was available in April 2006.
Apart from its stated objective of creating a virtual Sri Lankan community, ElaKiri also makes arrangements for its members to meet in real community gatherings as exhibitions, sports events etc..
Its membership base, as of 3 November 2016 was 549,450 members,
[ElaKiri Community Stats](_blank)
/ref> with this number growing every day. It is currently one of the most visited web sites in Sri Lanka.
It is the largest of Sri Lankan online communities originated in Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka (, ; si, ශ්රී ලංකා, Śrī Laṅkā, translit-std=ISO (); ta, இலங்கை, Ilaṅkai, translit-std=ISO ()), formerly known as Ceylon and officially the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, is an ...
.
''Elakiri''
The literal meaning of the word "''Elakiri''" in Traditional Sinhala is ''cow's milk
Milk is a white liquid food produced by the mammary glands of mammals. It is the primary source of nutrition for young mammals (including breastfed human infants) before they are able to digest solid food. Immune factors and immune-modulati ...
''. But in colloquial Sinhala it has more dominant meaning as an adjective
In linguistics, an adjective (list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated ) is a word that generally grammatical modifier, modifies a noun or noun phrase or describes its referent. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun.
Tra ...
and sometimes as a noun
A noun () is a word that generally functions as the name of a specific object or set of objects, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.Example nouns for:
* Living creatures (including people, alive, d ...
to describe something very delightful or fantastic. At the time of founding of the site it had become very popular word among the youth, which had helped through the publicity of the site.
Site design
The server-side scripting used in Elakiri is PHP
PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared toward web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by The PHP Group ...
. Elakiri used vBulletin
vBulletin is a proprietary Internet forum software package sold by MH Sub I, LLC doing business as vBulletin (formerly Jelsoft Enterprises and vBulletin Solutions). It is written in PHP and uses a MariaDB or MySQL database server. Similar produ ...
portal since 2004 when it was first launched, but after 18 May 2020, it was migrated to the XenForo forum software. The new platform allows users to select the dark theme if needed. Subsequent to the forum software change, a dedicated online market place was launched on the website.
Forum and blog
The Elakiri forum is one of the major features of Elakiri. Each member may get a title according to the number of posts they add to the forum. There also a reputation system
Reputation systems are programs or algorithms that allow users to rate each other in online communities in order to build trust through reputation. Some common uses of these systems can be found on E-commerce websites such as eBay, Amazon.com, and ...
which allow members to rate each other based on their posts.
The posting to forums is limited only to the members who have a valid account.
References
{{Reflist
External links
ElaKiri Official Website
Information technology companies of Sri Lanka