15 ms·

Come back, c2.com, we still need you

350 points by joshuanapoli 3y ago

kalium-xyz 3y ago
I love c2 its wiki and would be very sad to see it gone. Im certain I can find some archives but this still feels like a loss.
- knome 3y ago
 the portland pattern repository was an invaluable resource for me when I was searching out programming material on the web in the early 2000s. hopefully whatever this is is just a hiccup in their service
- tolciho 3y ago
 [flagged]
- shagie 3y ago
 (I've mentioned this on another thread here) Here's a copy of the entirety of C2 from https://archive.org/details/c2.com-wiki_201501 https://archive.org/details/c2.com-wiki_201501 And an implementation of a server to run it (search indexing and such) https://github.com/adamnew123456/wiki-server https://github.com/adamnew123456/wiki-server
- psnehanshu 3y ago
 Why do you love c2? If I may ask.
 - shagie 3y ago
 It is a frozen discussion from some of the people who we now hold in fairly high regard on a number of topics that are fairly core to software development. It is like being able to go back and be a fly on the wall in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohr–Einstein_debates# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohr–Einstein_debates# for physics (one can debate about the degree of significance of the topics and individuals - but I'm trying to get back a "this is where things where happening at the time.") As an aside, there was a community-fork of c2 where part of the community was more interested in communities rather than code. That site is still available - http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/ http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/ ( http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/MeatballBackgrounder http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/MeatballBackgrounder ) which has a lot of the same charm as c2. The thing with other great debates - there aren't any transcripts of them. C2 is the best that we have of the early "trying to figure out is now called agile".
 - psnehanshu 3y ago
 I noticed that all the links in these sites are CapitalizedWithoutSpaces. Why is that?
 - shagie 3y ago
 In the world before markdown and not wanting to embed html in the page - how do you designate that "this text" is a link to a page with the same name? Btw, it would work best if it was a regex (since this was perl CGI back in the day). if ($word =~ m/[:upper:]+[:lower:]+([:upper:]+[:lower:]+)+/) { $word = "<a href=\"${somePrefix}${word}\">${word}</a>" } or something to that effect.
 psnehanshu 3y ago
 > world before markdown and not wanting to embed html in the page Wdym
 shagie 3y ago
 Unrestricted html leads to all sorts of nasty problems with user generated content. Things like <script> bringing in Javascript you don't want, or <iframe> pulling in content you don't want (and messing up the page) or in the days of table layout people just putting in </table>, or people with <a href="goatse.cx"> scattered about in links. So, you limit the text that user generated content is allowed to use. And yet, you still need to figure out a way to allow links between pages within the site - but not allow the person to use an <a> tag. The way c2 did it was with MixedCaseWords that were easy for a regex to pick out and create link targets to. MixedCaseWords required no additional special characters to be used or worry about unmatched character pairs.
 psnehanshu 3y ago
 Now it makes sense, thanks for the explanation.
 3y ago
 - kalium-xyz 3y ago
 Doing searches on google has ended me up on it so many times I ended up bookmarking it and searching it instead.
gjvc 3y ago
I expect it's being replaced by http://fed.wiki.org/view/welcome-visitors/view/about-federated-wiki http://fed.wiki.org/view/welcome-visitors/view/about-federat...
- kevinmgranger 3y ago
  Ooh, is that tiddlywiki, or at least inspired by it?
  - gjvc 3y ago
    Not tiddlywiki, but instead a complete reworking of the original Wiki, work done by Ward Cunningham himself.
bhouston 3y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20230510153013/https://c2.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230510153013/https://c2.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham
- gpderetta 3y ago
  The copy of the wiki on webarchive doesn't seem to work for me. The C2 wiki is on of the foundational relics of the old web that need to be preserved for the future.
  - Jtsummers 3y ago
    https://web.archive.org/web/20170430022841/http://wiki.c2.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20170430022841/http://wiki.c2.co... I picked an arbitrary older date and it seems to be working for me (pre-redesign).
    - layer8 3y ago
      What you're linking to is already the "new" JS version. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35951027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35951027 for the last static version.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
akritrime 3y ago
I thought c2.com was in the middle of a redesign. Is it actually gone or just a technical glitch?
- shagie 3y ago
  That redesign has been sporadic. https://github.com/WardCunningham/remodeling/graphs/code-frequency https://github.com/WardCunningham/remodeling/graphs/code-fre...
psnehanshu 3y ago
In the source: <noscript> <center> notice javascript required to view this site why measured improvement in server performance awesome incremental search </center> </noscript>
- tempodox 3y ago
 Indeed, that was a relatively recent change that I never understood. It had been working without JS for a long time before that. And page loads became slower, not faster, for me.
 - masklinn 3y ago
 > And page loads became slower, not faster, for me. They're not exclusive, smaller server loads doesn't mean the experience is better for the client. For instance the server might just stop doing server-side template rendering. Instead it sends one static page, then the client requests and render the JSON for the article, or maybe the page only contains the JSON for the article instead of the rendered one. Then the template rendering cost stops showing up on the server, because it's not performed on the client, and serialising to JSON is almost certainly cheaper than rendering an ad-hoc and half-assed template format. But now the client has to perform a bunch of extra requests (to fetch the javascript and possibly the json) and it pays the cost for the template rendering, and that might be even halfer-assed, and more expensive, because it's out of sight of the server loads / logs. The result is that the server has gone from, say, 80ms CPU to 40ms CPU per page (which definitely qualifies as a "measured improvement in server performance"), but the client now needs an additional 300ms to reach loading completion.
 - blowski 3y ago
 Good description. And the site owner may have decided that trade-off works well for them - they are not incompetent or evil just because a few niche but noisy users have a moan.
 - 3y ago
TheRealPomax 3y ago
Never having heard of this site: what is/was it?
- mistrial9 3y ago
  software development wisdom from a time before cookie-cutters
- rileyphone 3y ago
  the original wiki
- Scarblac 3y ago
  Among other things, the home of the first Wiki, where people talked about software design and development since the 90s.
- jwilk 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiWikiWeb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiWikiWeb
- joshuanapoli 3y ago
  It's the original wiki, by Ward Cunningham. It has a lot of interesting discussions about software topics. I noticed the site was down because it has a page about the "Cobol Fallacy": that it is a misconception that software would be easier to create in natural language. I wanted to see how the (old) discussion on the topic compares with the present LLM mania/break-through.
- oniony 3y ago
  There are people saying it was the original wiki, but let me spell out what that actually means. Before the C2 WikiWikiWeb, few web sites had experimented with making it possible for its users to alter the site's contents. Granted, there were many sites with messaging forums you could post to, and there were places where you could add review or contribute new content entries, but not anything I can remember where you could edit the fabric of the site itself. Sites back then were 'published' by someone who owned them, and any contributions would go through a moderation process before they would be accepted and published, so there was no immediacy to such edits. The C2 wiki wiki web allowed any user to immediately make an edit or create a new page, and it the site relied upon its persistent history to roll back changes that the community deemed destructive. I remember feeling quite excited by the concept because it was so alien at the time -- that someone was willing to allow anonymous users to put stuff on a site they were ultimately publishing. The C2 WikiWikiWeb experiment is what ultimately lead to the creation of Wikipedia: an encyclopaedia that could be edited by the end users, hence the name. (In turn, the WikiWikiWeb was named from the Hawaiian word 'wikiwiki' meaning 'quick', which alluded to the lack of any moderation steps in its edits.)
tempodox 3y ago
By now it only says, “page does not exist”. :(
killerstorm 3y ago
Frankly, I don't find it particularly useful - almost everything is written in such a way that you have to know what the page is about to be able to understand. It's more like a collection of links than a wiki proper.
- kragen 3y ago
  this is literally the site that the word 'wiki' was invented to describe; it is the embodiment of the platonic essence of 'a wiki proper'
  - shadowgovt 3y ago
    ... or the alpha version that subsequent experiments with the idea improved upon.
    - kragen 3y ago
      some other wikis are certainly quite wonderful
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - killerstorm 3y ago
    1. That's not how it works. The first car is not the platonic essence of a car... 2. I guess it's more correct to say that it's too wiki and not enough pedia. I.e. a collection of links for a small community. But nobody thought of quality standards or introduction for new people. I.e. what function does it serve?
- ajmurmann 3y ago
  In a way it's like most pages in corporate wikis I've encountered. Of course the topics and content here is light-years better.
- forgetfulness 3y ago
  It was a wiki that didn't try to separate the content from the community that created it, so it was more like a forum where people could more or less agree on how to summarize a thread.
anononaut 3y ago
It occurs to me again that I need to figure out how entire websites can be downloaded and archived. Like Archive.org, but local.
- psychoslave 3y ago
  https://bash-prompt.net/guides/wget-mirror-website/ https://bash-prompt.net/guides/wget-mirror-website/
- danparsonson 3y ago
  https://www.httrack.com/ https://www.httrack.com/ is a good option
  - mesarvagya 3y ago
    Most of SPA websites today cannot be downloaded through httrack.
    - danparsonson 3y ago
      Yes SPAs will be next to impossible for a tool like this; I'm not sure how any tool could archive such a site tbh?
      - _a9 3y ago
        I use browsertrix-crawler[0] for crawling and it does well on JS heavy sites since it uses a real browser to request pages. Even has options to load browser profiles so you can crawl while being authenticated on sites. [0] https://github.com/webrecorder/browsertrix-crawler https://github.com/webrecorder/browsertrix-crawler
- shagie 3y ago
  The entirety of the archive pre rework can be found at https://archive.org/details/c2.com-wiki_201501 https://archive.org/details/c2.com-wiki_201501
dexen 3y ago
The C2 wiki was re-written and re-implemented as single page app, currently at http://fed.wiki.org/ http://fed.wiki.org/ It is an interesting change, to a more federated style. I ended up doing a small project inspired by this change, at https://github.com/dexen/tlb https://github.com/dexen/tlb
- WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
  But all the old content seems to be gone (or all links to it are broken)
- ricardobeat 3y ago
  Complete with unnecessary page transitions, cascading loaders and a ton of layout shifting. Classic SPA success story.
  - bongobingo1 3y ago
    I don't 100% disagree with the sentiment, but I think in this case the push-in style transitions fit well with a knowledge base wiki in which you (or at least, I) often drill down and pop out of topics. Though... that particular implementation seems to not handle unwinding the stack very well. And as the classic web2 adage goes, if you think your animation is "just right", knock another 3rd off it at least.
    - mananaysiempre 3y ago
      IMO TiddlyWiki[1] is a much better implementation of this UI idea of bite-sized, heavily linked text (card catalog?) with multiple simultaneously visible entries. (No federation and a bizarre storage approach though.) [1] https://tiddlywiki.com/ https://tiddlywiki.com/ (haven’t looked at the homepage in years, the current one seems kind of awful and not really bite-sized unfortunately).
- manojlds 3y ago
  Works bad on mobile with some weird transitions. Can't believe C2 is fallen to this trap as well.
InvisibleUp 3y ago
There was a mirror at https://kidneybone.com/c2/wiki/ https://kidneybone.com/c2/wiki/ without the SPA stuff, but that seems to be 503'd right now. (And even if it wasn't, I don't think it has a root page; you'd need to type in one of the page URLs manually.)
- adamnew123456 3y ago
  Huh, my other pages don't have the same issue. I guess the search indexer must've died - I'll restart it in an hour or two. FWIW, the snapshot of c2 that this runs off of is somewhat dated (https://archive.org/details/c2.com-wiki_201501 https://archive.org/details/c2.com-wiki_201501), so the last ~7 years of updates after the move to the federated wiki aren't present. Does anyone know where these original pages ended up in fedwiki after the migration?
  - InvisibleUp 3y ago
    Oh, it works now. Thanks! For those reading the comments here, https://kidneybone.com/c2/wiki/CategoryCategory https://kidneybone.com/c2/wiki/CategoryCategory is a great place to start browsing.
    - shagie 3y ago
      The instructions for spinning up a read only mirror: https://github.com/adamnew123456/wiki-server https://github.com/adamnew123456/wiki-server and in particular the C2 archive from https://archive.org/details/c2.com-wiki_201501 https://archive.org/details/c2.com-wiki_201501
waynecochran 3y ago
This is what I get page does not exist
lloydatkinson 3y ago
What happened?
- LordShredda 3y ago
  The web happened
amiga386 3y ago
Cool URLs don't change. https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI If you simply must redesign a site, make sure all the existing URLs still work and take someone visiting to the same equivalent in your new site. If you're going to drop a site before its redesign is ready... what the hell are you doing?
- PcChip 3y ago
  >If you simply must redesign a site, make sure all the existing URLs still work and take someone visiting to the same equivalent in your new site. looking at you, vmware
  - no_identd 3y ago
    Personally I consider what The Cybernetics Society pulled with regards to their new homepage / the botched (in numerous ways) move of their old homepage to https://archive.cybsoc.org/ https://archive.cybsoc.org/ far more atrocious, because with Microsoft and VMware it feels less tragic
- sph 3y ago
  Shameless plug. I'm working on a service to solve this very problem. I hate 404s, they're so frequent even my mum knows what a 404 Page Not Found error is. Right now I'm focusing on simple, automated link checking in a closed free alpha with a few users, but the killer feature I want to implement by the end of this month is notifying users if they redesign their website and forget to set redirects to old content. [1] I would love to have more alpha testers, and the plan is to make it available for free to open-source projects and documentation sites, like c2.com. If you join the waitlist, I'll let you straight in. https://bernard.app https://bernard.app -- 1: I am redoing my personal website, trying different static generators, and I cringe at the thought that I am completely unaware if I break someone's bookmarks, or the RSS feed URL changes and I lose the couple followers I have. Bernard exists first and foremost to solve this problem for me, and I hope it might be useful to others that care about this issue.
kevinmgranger 3y ago
Is this a deliberate shutdown or just an outage?
qingcharles 3y ago
That's weird. I spent some time going through the wiki last night. I was actually trying to find the original source for WikiWikiWeb, but I couldn't find a download anywhere.
monkpit 3y ago
I am consistently shocked that anyone ever found c2 insightful or helpful. Maybe it’s one of those things that was better in ye olden days. Every c2 link I have ever followed was just an incoherent blob of text arguing with itself. The TvTropes of the programming community, and just as much of a waste of time too.
- remexre 3y ago
  It's useful as a survey of (perhaps somewhat old) opinions about a topic; it's pretty useful as a collection of pros/cons, and imo interesting for its historical context besides.
- Bjartr 3y ago
  > an incoherent blob of text arguing with itself. That's exactly why I find it valuable. Little to no pretense of looking good and a bunch of perspectives in little space. An occasionally useful starting point to get the lay of the land.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    It's also almost perfectly what any long-running or stickied thread on any forum ever was, and that was usually a good thing.
- q845712 3y ago
  > an incoherent blob of text arguing with itself. Kinda like HackerNews but from before someone invented modern threading and quoting, yeah?
- omoikane 3y ago
  > The TvTropes of the programming community Not sure what you were expecting, but that was very much what some of us were looking for.
- aezart 3y ago
  A time waster's not always a bad thing; I spent lots of time browsing it back when I was a student intern because it seemed on topic" enough for me to not feel guilty.
marttt 3y ago
I'm pretty sure I browsed the java version last week, or maybe even just 2-3 days ago. Links to the JSON-formatted pages (thanks, fellow HNers!) don't seem to work either: https://c2.com/wiki/remodel/pages/EgolessProgramming https://c2.com/wiki/remodel/pages/EgolessProgramming https://proxy.c2.com/wiki/remodel/pages/ https://proxy.c2.com/wiki/remodel/pages/ I really love(..d?) the "stream of consciousness" nature of the c2 discussions. It is easily among the greatest intellectual rabbit holes of oldschool internet. The extremely minimal, kind of robust formatting probably also contributed to why it was such a compelling read at times. Content over form, for sure.
layer8 3y ago
Here is one of the last snapshots before the C2 wiki was replaced by the awful JS version: https://web.archive.org/web/2014/http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WelcomeVisitors https://web.archive.org/web/2014/http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?Welc... I'm linking to a bit earlier in time because on web.archive.org every hyperlink takes you a bit further to the future, eventually (sometime in 2016) ending up on a redirect to the JS version. Edit: Here is a mirror that is now functional again: https://kidneybone.com/c2/wiki/WelcomeVisitors https://kidneybone.com/c2/wiki/WelcomeVisitors. In particular, it has a working search page: https://kidneybone.com/c2/wiki/FindPage https://kidneybone.com/c2/wiki/FindPage See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35952055 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35952055 if you want to create your own mirror.
- patal 3y ago
  Thanks, this is really handy. The JS version does so not what I expect, and it certainly doesn't do what I want.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Dwedit 3y ago
I just see a blank page.
aigoochamna 3y ago
Using an SPA to reduce server load, when you could generate this content and use edge caches and have zero server load? I'm more upset with the new design choices than the architecture choice. The old site was ugly in a retro-cool way. The new site is just ugly.
exabrial 3y ago
wow. New site is fucking awful. http://fed.wiki.org http://fed.wiki.org What an abomination. JavaScript is ruining the internet.
Kelamir 3y ago
From the source: <center> notice javascript required to view this site why measured improvement in server performance awesome incremental search </center> It does load faster now that it doesn't display anything.
pcunning 3y ago
I fixed it (rebooted the server). Anecdotes: Ward (My dad) and I recently moved c2 off a server in a colo where it had lived for over a decade because the colo was closing. Now it lives in a cloud provider. It will live on. Eventually I envision It will get moved like the Agile Manifesto to a static site for long lived prosperity as a relic of the early internet.
- joshuanapoli 3y ago
  Thank you; I'm glad that you're keeping c2 online.
- wahnfrieden 3y ago
  Make sure it gets archived by an archive team not just hosted thanks
  - pcunning 3y ago
    Recommendation of who to work with?
    - davikr 3y ago
      Archive Team, #archiveteam on the hackint irc.
      - ehPReth 3y ago
        Agreed, Archive Team is great and I'm sure would appreciate working with the site owners for once rather than 'everything is on fire' mode
    - int_19h 3y ago
      I would also ask the Kiwix folk to make and host a Zimit - https://youzim.it/ https://youzim.it/ will make one, but they also host the more popular stuff themselves at https://download.kiwix.org/zim/ https://download.kiwix.org/zim/.
    - 3y ago
msie 3y ago
I don't like the pop-up page ui.
thagsimmons 3y ago
C2 was an incredible place at its peak - I was lucky to have started my career while the community was still (only just) functional. Looking back, it's hard to over-state how formative my time on C2 was - not only did I learn a lot about pattern languages, and coding, but the Wiki idea and the way the community operated is something I still think about today. C2 was a utopian vision of well-informed, kind, co-operative people working together in a radically open and egalitarian way. And it really did work, for a while. Unfortunately, the reasons why C2 ultimately died have been obscured by a well-meaning process of pruning that I think is meant to remove the "bad stuff" and leave only the "good stuff" for posterity. This is a shame, because the truth really is instructive - a few very prolific, toxic, borderline delusional people started dominating the wiki to the extent that more reasonable contributors just moved on. The C2 community started with an assumption that everyone could be reasoned with, and tried to handle the situation kindly and rationally. It was amazing to see the damage a very small number of people - basically just two - could do to a whole community of hundreds of well-meaning but naive people. It got to the point where there were pages dedicated to trying to think about the problems these people posed, with endless discussions about the paradox of tolerance and handling things through openness and kindness, and small factions arguing for permanent bans. Ultimately I think both badd actors _were_ banned, but by then it was too late - all the air was sucked out of the community. Watching the death of C2 unfold really darkened my view about the prospects of truly open societies, and deeply informed work that I've done on building communities since. Today, nearly all signs of the way this devastation played out have been erased from history. If you search for the names of the malignant characters there are a few mentions here and there, but there's no way to piece together the true sequence of events. I think an important part of C2's story, and one that is more relevant today than ever, has been lost as a consequence. I'm sure Ward has the full edit history of the wiki around, and I think he should publish it, complete and unvarnished, so we can study it and learn from it.
eimrine 3y ago
I have visited the website but understood nothing. Can you give me any good links from this source to at least understand what this wiki is about? I do not see a search field and I do not remember other websites with this kind of design.
- jpgvm 3y ago
  c2 is a special place. It's one of the earliest Wikis and contains a wealth of information, thoughts and history on programming. You might find http://wiki.c2.com/?WelcomeVisitors http://wiki.c2.com/?WelcomeVisitors a good place to start if you are curious.
- skue 3y ago
  It’s the original wiki (and coined the term): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiWikiWeb https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiWikiWeb Has a bit of a focus on coding, with pages/discussions for various programming patterns and terms, like: https://c2.com/xp/YouArentGonnaNeedIt.html https://c2.com/xp/YouArentGonnaNeedIt.html
btrower 3y ago
We do need c2.com. I was just thinking about wiki because it looks like I'm going to need to train a few people and I was wondering what Ward (not my dad) was running at c2.com I built a bunch of pages there and although perhaps the development ideas are not leading edge (or new?) any more, I at least like to look up the stuff that I wrote there. Also, I don't know who is using what out there, but crucial rules of thumb on that wiki are not followed and the continued fragility of systems is a result. That community was, let's say, idiosyncratic, but all good communities are, IMO. I am still very much hoping that c2.com comes live again, with improvements, and that stuff like federation gets hammered out. There are two things that I liked about wiki: 1) Its elegant, user friendly design/philosophy/ethos. :) 2) Its workingness. :( I am so glad I stumbled on this site. Bookmarking. If anybody cares, the query that got me here was: What is c2.com running? I just wanted to know the OS in case I wanted to send code along. Here is a design improvement I would hack in, just for the insanity of it: Add a Generative Pre-trained Transformer so you could type in ... aw nuts. You could get it to write something for you like this: Automated content generation: You can issue commands to the GPT backend to write about specific topics and have it generate content for the wiki page. This can be useful for quickly populating or updating pages with relevant information. Collaborative editing: With the GPT backend, you can allow visitors to temporarily rewrite the wiki page to their liking. This enables collaborative editing, where multiple users can contribute and modify the content while ensuring a history of changes is maintained. Intelligent refutation: You mentioned the ability to issue a disagreement and instruct the system to refute the previous content. By integrating GPT, you can prompt it to generate counter-arguments or provide alternative perspectives to foster a balanced discussion. Personalization and anticipation: Over time, the GPT backend can learn from user interactions and get to know individuals personally. This can enable it to anticipate their preferences, interests, or even the types of content they are likely to contribute. Such personalization can enhance the user experience. Aesthetic improvements: You can instruct the GPT backend to optimize or rewrite its own code to make the wiki front end more aesthetically pleasant. This may involve generating CSS styles, layout modifications, or even interactive design elements based on user preferences. Intelligent linking: By leveraging the GPT backend's language generation capabilities, you can automate the process of hyperlinking important terms, concepts, or keywords in the wiki content. The system can identify relevant sources, explanations, or further reading materials and dynamically add hyperlinks for easy access to additional information.

350 points by joshuanapoli 3y ago

I love c2 its wiki and would be very sad to see it gone. Im certain I can find some archives but this still feels like a loss.

knome 3y ago
the portland pattern repository was an invaluable resource for me when I was searching out programming material on the web in the early 2000s. hopefully whatever this is is just a hiccup in their service
tolciho 3y ago
[flagged]
shagie 3y ago
(I've mentioned this on another thread here) Here's a copy of the entirety of C2 from https://archive.org/details/c2.com-wiki_201501 https://archive.org/details/c2.com-wiki_201501 And an implementation of a server to run it (search indexing and such) https://github.com/adamnew123456/wiki-server https://github.com/adamnew123456/wiki-server
psnehanshu 3y ago
Why do you love c2? If I may ask.
- shagie 3y ago
 It is a frozen discussion from some of the people who we now hold in fairly high regard on a number of topics that are fairly core to software development. It is like being able to go back and be a fly on the wall in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohr–Einstein_debates# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohr–Einstein_debates# for physics (one can debate about the degree of significance of the topics and individuals - but I'm trying to get back a "this is where things where happening at the time.") As an aside, there was a community-fork of c2 where part of the community was more interested in communities rather than code. That site is still available - http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/ http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/ ( http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/MeatballBackgrounder http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/MeatballBackgrounder ) which has a lot of the same charm as c2. The thing with other great debates - there aren't any transcripts of them. C2 is the best that we have of the early "trying to figure out is now called agile".
 - psnehanshu 3y ago
 I noticed that all the links in these sites are CapitalizedWithoutSpaces. Why is that?
 - shagie 3y ago
 In the world before markdown and not wanting to embed html in the page - how do you designate that "this text" is a link to a page with the same name? Btw, it would work best if it was a regex (since this was perl CGI back in the day). if ($word =~ m/[:upper:]+[:lower:]+([:upper:]+[:lower:]+)+/) { $word = "<a href=\"${somePrefix}${word}\">${word}</a>" } or something to that effect.
 - psnehanshu 3y ago
 > world before markdown and not wanting to embed html in the page Wdym
 shagie 3y ago
 Unrestricted html leads to all sorts of nasty problems with user generated content. Things like <script> bringing in Javascript you don't want, or <iframe> pulling in content you don't want (and messing up the page) or in the days of table layout people just putting in </table>, or people with <a href="goatse.cx"> scattered about in links. So, you limit the text that user generated content is allowed to use. And yet, you still need to figure out a way to allow links between pages within the site - but not allow the person to use an <a> tag. The way c2 did it was with MixedCaseWords that were easy for a regex to pick out and create link targets to. MixedCaseWords required no additional special characters to be used or worry about unmatched character pairs.
 psnehanshu 3y ago
 Now it makes sense, thanks for the explanation.
 3y ago
- kalium-xyz 3y ago
 Doing searches on google has ended me up on it so many times I ended up bookmarking it and searching it instead.

gjvc 3y ago

I expect it's being replaced by http://fed.wiki.org/view/welcome-visitors/view/about-federated-wiki http://fed.wiki.org/view/welcome-visitors/view/about-federat...

kevinmgranger 3y ago
Ooh, is that tiddlywiki, or at least inspired by it?
- gjvc 3y ago
  Not tiddlywiki, but instead a complete reworking of the original Wiki, work done by Ward Cunningham himself.

bhouston 3y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20230510153013/https://c2.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230510153013/https://c2.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham

gpderetta 3y ago
The copy of the wiki on webarchive doesn't seem to work for me. The C2 wiki is on of the foundational relics of the old web that need to be preserved for the future.
- Jtsummers 3y ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20170430022841/http://wiki.c2.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20170430022841/http://wiki.c2.co... I picked an arbitrary older date and it seems to be working for me (pre-redesign).
  - layer8 3y ago
    What you're linking to is already the "new" JS version. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35951027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35951027 for the last static version.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

akritrime 3y ago

I thought c2.com was in the middle of a redesign. Is it actually gone or just a technical glitch?

shagie 3y ago
That redesign has been sporadic. https://github.com/WardCunningham/remodeling/graphs/code-frequency https://github.com/WardCunningham/remodeling/graphs/code-fre...

psnehanshu 3y ago

In the source: <noscript> <center> notice javascript required to view this site why measured improvement in server performance awesome incremental search </center> </noscript>

tempodox 3y ago
Indeed, that was a relatively recent change that I never understood. It had been working without JS for a long time before that. And page loads became slower, not faster, for me.
- masklinn 3y ago
  > And page loads became slower, not faster, for me. They're not exclusive, smaller server loads doesn't mean the experience is better for the client. For instance the server might just stop doing server-side template rendering. Instead it sends one static page, then the client requests and render the JSON for the article, or maybe the page only contains the JSON for the article instead of the rendered one. Then the template rendering cost stops showing up on the server, because it's not performed on the client, and serialising to JSON is almost certainly cheaper than rendering an ad-hoc and half-assed template format. But now the client has to perform a bunch of extra requests (to fetch the javascript and possibly the json) and it pays the cost for the template rendering, and that might be even halfer-assed, and more expensive, because it's out of sight of the server loads / logs. The result is that the server has gone from, say, 80ms CPU to 40ms CPU per page (which definitely qualifies as a "measured improvement in server performance"), but the client now needs an additional 300ms to reach loading completion.
  - blowski 3y ago
    Good description. And the site owner may have decided that trade-off works well for them - they are not incompetent or evil just because a few niche but noisy users have a moan.
    - 3y ago

TheRealPomax 3y ago

Never having heard of this site: what is/was it?

mistrial9 3y ago
software development wisdom from a time before cookie-cutters
rileyphone 3y ago
the original wiki
Scarblac 3y ago
Among other things, the home of the first Wiki, where people talked about software design and development since the 90s.
jwilk 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiWikiWeb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiWikiWeb
joshuanapoli 3y ago
It's the original wiki, by Ward Cunningham. It has a lot of interesting discussions about software topics. I noticed the site was down because it has a page about the "Cobol Fallacy": that it is a misconception that software would be easier to create in natural language. I wanted to see how the (old) discussion on the topic compares with the present LLM mania/break-through.
oniony 3y ago
There are people saying it was the original wiki, but let me spell out what that actually means. Before the C2 WikiWikiWeb, few web sites had experimented with making it possible for its users to alter the site's contents. Granted, there were many sites with messaging forums you could post to, and there were places where you could add review or contribute new content entries, but not anything I can remember where you could edit the fabric of the site itself. Sites back then were 'published' by someone who owned them, and any contributions would go through a moderation process before they would be accepted and published, so there was no immediacy to such edits. The C2 wiki wiki web allowed any user to immediately make an edit or create a new page, and it the site relied upon its persistent history to roll back changes that the community deemed destructive. I remember feeling quite excited by the concept because it was so alien at the time -- that someone was willing to allow anonymous users to put stuff on a site they were ultimately publishing. The C2 WikiWikiWeb experiment is what ultimately lead to the creation of Wikipedia: an encyclopaedia that could be edited by the end users, hence the name. (In turn, the WikiWikiWeb was named from the Hawaiian word 'wikiwiki' meaning 'quick', which alluded to the lack of any moderation steps in its edits.)

tempodox 3y ago

By now it only says, “page does not exist”. :(

killerstorm 3y ago

Frankly, I don't find it particularly useful - almost everything is written in such a way that you have to know what the page is about to be able to understand. It's more like a collection of links than a wiki proper.

kragen 3y ago
this is literally the site that the word 'wiki' was invented to describe; it is the embodiment of the platonic essence of 'a wiki proper'
- shadowgovt 3y ago
  ... or the alpha version that subsequent experiments with the idea improved upon.
  - kragen 3y ago
    some other wikis are certainly quite wonderful
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- killerstorm 3y ago
  1. That's not how it works. The first car is not the platonic essence of a car... 2. I guess it's more correct to say that it's too wiki and not enough pedia. I.e. a collection of links for a small community. But nobody thought of quality standards or introduction for new people. I.e. what function does it serve?
ajmurmann 3y ago
In a way it's like most pages in corporate wikis I've encountered. Of course the topics and content here is light-years better.
forgetfulness 3y ago
It was a wiki that didn't try to separate the content from the community that created it, so it was more like a forum where people could more or less agree on how to summarize a thread.

anononaut 3y ago

It occurs to me again that I need to figure out how entire websites can be downloaded and archived. Like Archive.org, but local.

psychoslave 3y ago
https://bash-prompt.net/guides/wget-mirror-website/ https://bash-prompt.net/guides/wget-mirror-website/
danparsonson 3y ago
https://www.httrack.com/ https://www.httrack.com/ is a good option
- mesarvagya 3y ago
  Most of SPA websites today cannot be downloaded through httrack.
  - danparsonson 3y ago
    Yes SPAs will be next to impossible for a tool like this; I'm not sure how any tool could archive such a site tbh?
    - _a9 3y ago
      I use browsertrix-crawler[0] for crawling and it does well on JS heavy sites since it uses a real browser to request pages. Even has options to load browser profiles so you can crawl while being authenticated on sites. [0] https://github.com/webrecorder/browsertrix-crawler https://github.com/webrecorder/browsertrix-crawler
shagie 3y ago
The entirety of the archive pre rework can be found at https://archive.org/details/c2.com-wiki_201501 https://archive.org/details/c2.com-wiki_201501

dexen 3y ago

The C2 wiki was re-written and re-implemented as single page app, currently at http://fed.wiki.org/ http://fed.wiki.org/ It is an interesting change, to a more federated style. I ended up doing a small project inspired by this change, at https://github.com/dexen/tlb https://github.com/dexen/tlb

WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
But all the old content seems to be gone (or all links to it are broken)
ricardobeat 3y ago
Complete with unnecessary page transitions, cascading loaders and a ton of layout shifting. Classic SPA success story.
- bongobingo1 3y ago
  I don't 100% disagree with the sentiment, but I think in this case the push-in style transitions fit well with a knowledge base wiki in which you (or at least, I) often drill down and pop out of topics. Though... that particular implementation seems to not handle unwinding the stack very well. And as the classic web2 adage goes, if you think your animation is "just right", knock another 3rd off it at least.
  - mananaysiempre 3y ago
    IMO TiddlyWiki[1] is a much better implementation of this UI idea of bite-sized, heavily linked text (card catalog?) with multiple simultaneously visible entries. (No federation and a bizarre storage approach though.) [1] https://tiddlywiki.com/ https://tiddlywiki.com/ (haven’t looked at the homepage in years, the current one seems kind of awful and not really bite-sized unfortunately).
manojlds 3y ago
Works bad on mobile with some weird transitions. Can't believe C2 is fallen to this trap as well.

InvisibleUp 3y ago

There was a mirror at https://kidneybone.com/c2/wiki/ https://kidneybone.com/c2/wiki/ without the SPA stuff, but that seems to be 503'd right now. (And even if it wasn't, I don't think it has a root page; you'd need to type in one of the page URLs manually.)

adamnew123456 3y ago
Huh, my other pages don't have the same issue. I guess the search indexer must've died - I'll restart it in an hour or two. FWIW, the snapshot of c2 that this runs off of is somewhat dated (https://archive.org/details/c2.com-wiki_201501 https://archive.org/details/c2.com-wiki_201501), so the last ~7 years of updates after the move to the federated wiki aren't present. Does anyone know where these original pages ended up in fedwiki after the migration?
- InvisibleUp 3y ago
  Oh, it works now. Thanks! For those reading the comments here, https://kidneybone.com/c2/wiki/CategoryCategory https://kidneybone.com/c2/wiki/CategoryCategory is a great place to start browsing.
  - shagie 3y ago
    The instructions for spinning up a read only mirror: https://github.com/adamnew123456/wiki-server https://github.com/adamnew123456/wiki-server and in particular the C2 archive from https://archive.org/details/c2.com-wiki_201501 https://archive.org/details/c2.com-wiki_201501

waynecochran 3y ago

This is what I get page does not exist

lloydatkinson 3y ago

What happened?

LordShredda 3y ago
The web happened

amiga386 3y ago

Cool URLs don't change. https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI If you simply must redesign a site, make sure all the existing URLs still work and take someone visiting to the same equivalent in your new site. If you're going to drop a site before its redesign is ready... what the hell are you doing?

PcChip 3y ago
>If you simply must redesign a site, make sure all the existing URLs still work and take someone visiting to the same equivalent in your new site. looking at you, vmware
- no_identd 3y ago
  Personally I consider what The Cybernetics Society pulled with regards to their new homepage / the botched (in numerous ways) move of their old homepage to https://archive.cybsoc.org/ https://archive.cybsoc.org/ far more atrocious, because with Microsoft and VMware it feels less tragic
sph 3y ago
Shameless plug. I'm working on a service to solve this very problem. I hate 404s, they're so frequent even my mum knows what a 404 Page Not Found error is. Right now I'm focusing on simple, automated link checking in a closed free alpha with a few users, but the killer feature I want to implement by the end of this month is notifying users if they redesign their website and forget to set redirects to old content. [1] I would love to have more alpha testers, and the plan is to make it available for free to open-source projects and documentation sites, like c2.com. If you join the waitlist, I'll let you straight in. https://bernard.app https://bernard.app -- 1: I am redoing my personal website, trying different static generators, and I cringe at the thought that I am completely unaware if I break someone's bookmarks, or the RSS feed URL changes and I lose the couple followers I have. Bernard exists first and foremost to solve this problem for me, and I hope it might be useful to others that care about this issue.

kevinmgranger 3y ago

Is this a deliberate shutdown or just an outage?

qingcharles 3y ago

That's weird. I spent some time going through the wiki last night. I was actually trying to find the original source for WikiWikiWeb, but I couldn't find a download anywhere.

monkpit 3y ago

I am consistently shocked that anyone ever found c2 insightful or helpful. Maybe it’s one of those things that was better in ye olden days. Every c2 link I have ever followed was just an incoherent blob of text arguing with itself. The TvTropes of the programming community, and just as much of a waste of time too.

remexre 3y ago
It's useful as a survey of (perhaps somewhat old) opinions about a topic; it's pretty useful as a collection of pros/cons, and imo interesting for its historical context besides.
Bjartr 3y ago
> an incoherent blob of text arguing with itself. That's exactly why I find it valuable. Little to no pretense of looking good and a bunch of perspectives in little space. An occasionally useful starting point to get the lay of the land.
- bombcar 3y ago
  It's also almost perfectly what any long-running or stickied thread on any forum ever was, and that was usually a good thing.
q845712 3y ago
> an incoherent blob of text arguing with itself. Kinda like HackerNews but from before someone invented modern threading and quoting, yeah?
omoikane 3y ago
> The TvTropes of the programming community Not sure what you were expecting, but that was very much what some of us were looking for.
aezart 3y ago
A time waster's not always a bad thing; I spent lots of time browsing it back when I was a student intern because it seemed on topic" enough for me to not feel guilty.

marttt 3y ago

I'm pretty sure I browsed the java version last week, or maybe even just 2-3 days ago. Links to the JSON-formatted pages (thanks, fellow HNers!) don't seem to work either: https://c2.com/wiki/remodel/pages/EgolessProgramming https://c2.com/wiki/remodel/pages/EgolessProgramming https://proxy.c2.com/wiki/remodel/pages/ https://proxy.c2.com/wiki/remodel/pages/ I really love(..d?) the "stream of consciousness" nature of the c2 discussions. It is easily among the greatest intellectual rabbit holes of oldschool internet. The extremely minimal, kind of robust formatting probably also contributed to why it was such a compelling read at times. Content over form, for sure.

layer8 3y ago

Here is one of the last snapshots before the C2 wiki was replaced by the awful JS version: https://web.archive.org/web/2014/http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WelcomeVisitors https://web.archive.org/web/2014/http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?Welc... I'm linking to a bit earlier in time because on web.archive.org every hyperlink takes you a bit further to the future, eventually (sometime in 2016) ending up on a redirect to the JS version. Edit: Here is a mirror that is now functional again: https://kidneybone.com/c2/wiki/WelcomeVisitors https://kidneybone.com/c2/wiki/WelcomeVisitors. In particular, it has a working search page: https://kidneybone.com/c2/wiki/FindPage https://kidneybone.com/c2/wiki/FindPage See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35952055 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35952055 if you want to create your own mirror.

patal 3y ago
Thanks, this is really handy. The JS version does so not what I expect, and it certainly doesn't do what I want.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Dwedit 3y ago

I just see a blank page.

aigoochamna 3y ago

Using an SPA to reduce server load, when you could generate this content and use edge caches and have zero server load? I'm more upset with the new design choices than the architecture choice. The old site was ugly in a retro-cool way. The new site is just ugly.

exabrial 3y ago

wow. New site is fucking awful. http://fed.wiki.org http://fed.wiki.org What an abomination. JavaScript is ruining the internet.

Kelamir 3y ago

From the source: <center> notice javascript required to view this site why measured improvement in server performance awesome incremental search </center> It does load faster now that it doesn't display anything.

pcunning 3y ago

I fixed it (rebooted the server). Anecdotes: Ward (My dad) and I recently moved c2 off a server in a colo where it had lived for over a decade because the colo was closing. Now it lives in a cloud provider. It will live on. Eventually I envision It will get moved like the Agile Manifesto to a static site for long lived prosperity as a relic of the early internet.

joshuanapoli 3y ago
Thank you; I'm glad that you're keeping c2 online.
wahnfrieden 3y ago
Make sure it gets archived by an archive team not just hosted thanks
- pcunning 3y ago
  Recommendation of who to work with?
  - davikr 3y ago
    Archive Team, #archiveteam on the hackint irc.
    - ehPReth 3y ago
      Agreed, Archive Team is great and I'm sure would appreciate working with the site owners for once rather than 'everything is on fire' mode
  - int_19h 3y ago
    I would also ask the Kiwix folk to make and host a Zimit - https://youzim.it/ https://youzim.it/ will make one, but they also host the more popular stuff themselves at https://download.kiwix.org/zim/ https://download.kiwix.org/zim/.
  - 3y ago

msie 3y ago

I don't like the pop-up page ui.

thagsimmons 3y ago

C2 was an incredible place at its peak - I was lucky to have started my career while the community was still (only just) functional. Looking back, it's hard to over-state how formative my time on C2 was - not only did I learn a lot about pattern languages, and coding, but the Wiki idea and the way the community operated is something I still think about today. C2 was a utopian vision of well-informed, kind, co-operative people working together in a radically open and egalitarian way. And it really did work, for a while. Unfortunately, the reasons why C2 ultimately died have been obscured by a well-meaning process of pruning that I think is meant to remove the "bad stuff" and leave only the "good stuff" for posterity. This is a shame, because the truth really is instructive - a few very prolific, toxic, borderline delusional people started dominating the wiki to the extent that more reasonable contributors just moved on. The C2 community started with an assumption that everyone could be reasoned with, and tried to handle the situation kindly and rationally. It was amazing to see the damage a very small number of people - basically just two - could do to a whole community of hundreds of well-meaning but naive people. It got to the point where there were pages dedicated to trying to think about the problems these people posed, with endless discussions about the paradox of tolerance and handling things through openness and kindness, and small factions arguing for permanent bans. Ultimately I think both badd actors _were_ banned, but by then it was too late - all the air was sucked out of the community. Watching the death of C2 unfold really darkened my view about the prospects of truly open societies, and deeply informed work that I've done on building communities since. Today, nearly all signs of the way this devastation played out have been erased from history. If you search for the names of the malignant characters there are a few mentions here and there, but there's no way to piece together the true sequence of events. I think an important part of C2's story, and one that is more relevant today than ever, has been lost as a consequence. I'm sure Ward has the full edit history of the wiki around, and I think he should publish it, complete and unvarnished, so we can study it and learn from it.

eimrine 3y ago

I have visited the website but understood nothing. Can you give me any good links from this source to at least understand what this wiki is about? I do not see a search field and I do not remember other websites with this kind of design.

jpgvm 3y ago
c2 is a special place. It's one of the earliest Wikis and contains a wealth of information, thoughts and history on programming. You might find http://wiki.c2.com/?WelcomeVisitors http://wiki.c2.com/?WelcomeVisitors a good place to start if you are curious.
skue 3y ago
It’s the original wiki (and coined the term): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiWikiWeb https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiWikiWeb Has a bit of a focus on coding, with pages/discussions for various programming patterns and terms, like: https://c2.com/xp/YouArentGonnaNeedIt.html https://c2.com/xp/YouArentGonnaNeedIt.html

btrower 3y ago

We do need c2.com. I was just thinking about wiki because it looks like I'm going to need to train a few people and I was wondering what Ward (not my dad) was running at c2.com I built a bunch of pages there and although perhaps the development ideas are not leading edge (or new?) any more, I at least like to look up the stuff that I wrote there. Also, I don't know who is using what out there, but crucial rules of thumb on that wiki are not followed and the continued fragility of systems is a result. That community was, let's say, idiosyncratic, but all good communities are, IMO. I am still very much hoping that c2.com comes live again, with improvements, and that stuff like federation gets hammered out. There are two things that I liked about wiki: 1) Its elegant, user friendly design/philosophy/ethos. :) 2) Its workingness. :( I am so glad I stumbled on this site. Bookmarking. If anybody cares, the query that got me here was: What is c2.com running? I just wanted to know the OS in case I wanted to send code along. Here is a design improvement I would hack in, just for the insanity of it: Add a Generative Pre-trained Transformer so you could type in ... aw nuts. You could get it to write something for you like this: Automated content generation: You can issue commands to the GPT backend to write about specific topics and have it generate content for the wiki page. This can be useful for quickly populating or updating pages with relevant information. Collaborative editing: With the GPT backend, you can allow visitors to temporarily rewrite the wiki page to their liking. This enables collaborative editing, where multiple users can contribute and modify the content while ensuring a history of changes is maintained. Intelligent refutation: You mentioned the ability to issue a disagreement and instruct the system to refute the previous content. By integrating GPT, you can prompt it to generate counter-arguments or provide alternative perspectives to foster a balanced discussion. Personalization and anticipation: Over time, the GPT backend can learn from user interactions and get to know individuals personally. This can enable it to anticipate their preferences, interests, or even the types of content they are likely to contribute. Such personalization can enhance the user experience. Aesthetic improvements: You can instruct the GPT backend to optimize or rewrite its own code to make the wiki front end more aesthetically pleasant. This may involve generating CSS styles, layout modifications, or even interactive design elements based on user preferences. Intelligent linking: By leveraging the GPT backend's language generation capabilities, you can automate the process of hyperlinking important terms, concepts, or keywords in the wiki content. The system can identify relevant sources, explanations, or further reading materials and dynamically add hyperlinks for easy access to additional information.