This was written to satisfy the recurring curiosity expressed in the catbox about C2. I have no "official" sanction for this: I have an account there, and these are my impressions. I welcome corrections.


Ed. Note, March 2008: The Community2 website is no longer operational.


Community2.com is a project by dann, utilizing the core code of the Everything engine. The following is a cut-and-paste from C2 FAQ: history. The author was wamckee:

To know the history of C2 is to know the people of C2.
Although dann was not alone in thinking E2 is a community, he was at the right place at the right time to act on those feelings.
C2 was conceived soon after dann join the ranks of the E2 family. C2's birth came three years later when fuzzie and dann became increasingly frustrated that their work and ideas on the ecore were falling on deaf ears within the power structure of E2.
Code, to a coder, is art. dann, fuzzie and call are artists. Their medium is Perl script. There was a feeling that they needed more room to express themselves. They also shared a common bond that E2 had forged.
dann's friend, bones, always has a strong vision of what he wanted E2 to be and it was different from what was important to dann. Dann's interest was and still is a) make the code better and b) support and nurture the E2 community. Obviously, this was not going to happen at E2.
So, on Nov. 4, 2002, community2.com was registered with joker.com. Its creation was a necessity since the new code needed to be developed and tested online but the name was carefully chosen to reflect the as-yet unrealized nature of the site.
Moving forward about 6 months, the true nature of C2 began to form with the creation of the Community Planning forum. Forums having just recently been added as a new feature of C2. Before, it was just a bunch of coders and testers. Now, people started to contribute ideas on what exactly C2, as a community, should and should not be.

What's it like?

Mostly, it looks like E2. The front page even has nodelets down the right side, and a list of recently cooled "topics" (nodes) down the left column, and links to recently cooled "articles" (writeups) in the middle where E2 has "the Cream of the Cool".

This Welcome page is bound to change after more fundamental issues of site operation have been decided. Though there is talk about not having editors and not deleting anything, there's still a link on the front page for Deletion Requests. Currently there's no XP and no levels, and the significance of a "C!" or "cool" is not yet decided. Thus, while it's sort of thrilling when I log on and get 90-some odd votes and 10 c!hings, it really doesn't mean anything.

The interface has a nice clean look, and some parts of it are more functional. The message system has been improved. The chat feature has a built-in pop-up client and automatic archiving. A user search generates tables with more information (in addition to topic titles: dates, authors, types of documents).

Users can append comments to each other's articles. Below an article is presented a text box to make a comment, which is given the default title: "Re: {topic}" (though you can change that). A comment will be displayed under the article with indentation. You can even add comments to comments, which by default are titled: "Re: Re: {topic}", and create nested comments. The titles of New Comments appear on the front page, and it is not unusual to see "Re: Re: Re: Re: {topic}". (At that point, the nested indentation starts making it hard to read).

As an E2 editor, I frequently have to delete comments from E2 nodes, with the message: "writeup does not mean reply" or "E2 is not a bulletin board" or some other cryptic remark which can't explain why we do this. I find this vaguely unsatisfying. There should be a place for these comments. This way, the comments are tagged and flagged as comments, both visually and as items in the database.

At the moment, the selection of writeups and chat for your reading pleasure is a rather limited, which is a function of very limited traffic. The site is not open to the public: you have to ask dann for an account, and on October 1, 2003, the Welcome page reported there were 159 users (47 logged in in the past day ). Instead of 40-80 other users, there are usually only 3 or 4 logged in at any given moment. Most of the "articles" are imported from E2 (there is a handy teleportation device for this) but even so, days can go by before there is any change to "New Articles". There are often, however, new comments on the "Community Planning" forum.

A recent series of articles on C2 by eponymous has introduced me to the term Metacore, a term from the neopoeia site. Metacore is a group of people interested in how an online community operates. The metacore engages in self-referential discussions concerning the rules of the game, with particular emphasis on questions of "censorship" and other struggles between the administration and the regular users. On E2 we tend to call this "noding about noding", and we don't encourage it.

While the metacore discussion on C2 sometimes descends to E2-bashing, it's mostly on a pretty high level. The free-wheeling discussion, based on the premise that C2 could become anything, is inherently more interesting than yet-another internal power struggle between people with various axes to grind.

Who is on C2?

Mostly people from E2: both the "in" crowd and the "out".

C2 has some "banned" E2 personalities like WonkoDSane, karmaflux, radlab0, frankie and SEF. (Clarification: radlab0 is not banned. She is, however, married to WonkoDSane. This would make a good sitcom or reality show.) On the other hand, C2 also has E2 "gods" like dem bones, panamaus, and Roninspoon, and editors like me and NinjaPenguin and witchiepoo.

Noders don't always keep their E2 usernames. Perhaps because the site is currently closed to the public, or dann's commitment to "community", noders seem more willing to use real names, rather than hide behind ambiguous disguises (especially gender-neutral names).

What's Going to Be Different About Community2?

A lot of things will be the same, just called something different. The names of things don't seem to be settled. On C2 you will sometimes see the term "tacos". Think "nodeshell": writeups and comments are "filling". There is general consensus that the term "node" as used on E2 is ambiguous and confusing. Coders working with ecore have one idea ("everything is a node"), while some of us think that only the writeup topic should be called a "node".

For E2 noders, "Forum" and "Comment" are new structures: "forum" seems to mean bulletin board, and "comments" are writeups appended to writeups. The "Community Journal" may evolve into something different, and supposedly has coded into some new capabilities, but right now it just seems to be a disorganized substitute for daylogs.

It has not been decided how to use voting. The majority view seems to be: do away with levels and instead use votes to determine whether a writeup shows up on your browser, establishing "viewing threshholds" like Slashdot. For example, you could set your account to hide everything less than +5.

As a troll or moron filter, the current popular idea is to have "verified" users. Instead of qualifying for privileges on the system by reputation, as on E2, under this proposal C2 would have only one level of privileged user, who has been vouched for by three existing users. Administrators would retain a few core privileges regarding coding, and everything else would be open to "verified" users. Alternatively, more complicated "trust metrics" (based on things like time and amount of contribution to the site) have been proposed to dole out privileges.

Building on dann's preference for "community", rather than "raising the bar" and publishing quality writing, there is a lot of talk which sounds revolutionary, ni dieu, ni maitre and all that. There is a great deal of hostility expressed in the C2 forums towards all the various disciplinary measures invoked on E2: deleting writeups, borging, locking accounts.

If quality is not a central concern than a lot of "quality control" measures can be jettisoned. The details are not decided, but there will probably be no "editors" on C2. This by itself is not revolutionary: E2 also plans to do away with editors some day, by collapsing the functions of "gods" and "editors" into one staff position. On C2, however, this is not merely a reorganization of functions: there will be no removal of content from C2. Seriously abusive writeups will get hidden from public view to everyone but the administrators and the person who submitted it, and individual users will have some way of hiding articles so they never have to see them again.

This talk reminds me of hippie communes in Northern New Mexico: they were all miserable and none of them lasted. At least we won't try to grow our own food and marijuana.

Will C2 compete with E2?

Competition assumes the same goal. In that sense C2 is definitely not intended to compete with E2. The goal of E2 is quality, the goal of C2 is community.

Dann and his fellow coders have already used C2 to demonstrate how the Everything code could be improved. It might work the same way with writing: it could very well evolve that people try out writeups at C2, get a little feedback in the comments, and then submit improved writing. Conversely, a writeup might be submitted on E2 just to see how many votes it gets, and then the same writeup imported to C2 to see what kind of discussion it generates.

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