Come back, c2.com, we still need you

http://wiki.c2.com

by joshuanapoli • 3 years ago

350 145 3 years ago

wiki.c2.com

kalium-xyz2• 3 years 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• 3 years 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

shagie9• 3 years 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

And an implementation of a server to run it (search indexing and such) https://github.com/adamnew123456/wiki-server

psnehanshu6• 3 years ago

Why do you love c2? If I may ask.

shagie9• 3 years 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# 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/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".

kalium-xyz2• 3 years ago

Doing searches on google has ended me up on it so many times I ended up bookmarking it and searching it instead.

gjvc2• 3 years ago

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

kevinmgranger2• 3 years ago

Ooh, is that tiddlywiki, or at least inspired by it?

gjvc2• 3 years ago

Not tiddlywiki, but instead a complete reworking of the original Wiki, work done by Ward Cunningham himself.

bhouston• 3 years ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20230510153013/https://c2.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham

gpderetta• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

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).

akritrime• 3 years ago

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

shagie9• 3 years ago

That redesign has been sporadic. https://github.com/WardCunningham/remodeling/graphs/code-fre...

psnehanshu6• 3 years ago

In the source:

   <noscript>
    <center>
      <b>notice</b>
      <p>javascript required to view this site</p>
      <b>why</b>
      <p>measured improvement in server performance</p>
      <p>awesome incremental search</p>
    </center>
  </noscript>

tempodox2• 3 years 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.

masklinn2• 3 years 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.

skrebbel• 3 years ago

Sometimes I feel like all 7 people who have JS disabled have an HN account so they can tell people that their site doesn't work with JS disabled

postalrat• 3 years ago

Makes sense if they don't need JavaScript for hn.

lynx234• 3 years ago

It just violates the KISS principle too much when the site in question is mostly presenting documents. I can see JS being useful if you have some sort of SPA app. But essentially docs with JS are a total no-go. Why do I need to fire up a 50MB binary to read a simple document again? Ahh, because reasons, I see...

__s• 3 years ago

uBlock Origin allows disabling JS by default, I use on my phone to preserve battery life

aftbit• 3 years ago

There are dozens of us! Dozens!

I mostly browse sites with JS disabled (with lots of exceptions of course) to get rid of those awful Euro cookie banners. Are those required in US now for some reason? My browser doesn't save the cookie that says they can save cookies, so they constantly prompt me.

sneak• 3 years ago

There are actually 8 of us, not counting Ed Snowden, who once famously explained to Bart Gellman: "turn off the fucking scripts".

Almost all modern browser compromise is via JS.

justaj• 3 years ago

FYI: There have been JS-based exploits in the past that were used to de-anonymize Tor users: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-announce/2013-Aug...

insulanus2• 3 years ago

It would be great if there was a read-only version of the site that can be crawled.

Much easier to do that supporting both HTTP and JS for both read and write.

TheRealPomax• 3 years ago

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

mistrial9• 3 years ago

software development wisdom from a time before cookie-cutters

rileyphone• 3 years ago

the original wiki

Scarblac• 3 years ago

Among other things, the home of the first Wiki, where people talked about software design and development since the 90s.

jwilk• 3 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiWikiWeb

joshuanapoli2• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.)

cbm-vic-20• 3 years ago

Everything2 was another example of a user-driven site that allowed linking between pages. It's actually still alive today:

https://everything2.com/title/Y+combinator

ilaksh• 3 years ago

I thought that the Interpedia concept was closer to an origin of the Wikipedia idea.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpedia

I remember participating in the discussion.

Lammy• 3 years ago

Check out the HN submissions from this domain: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=c2.com

tempodox2• 3 years ago

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

killerstorm2• 3 years 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.

kragen2• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

... or the alpha version that subsequent experiments with the idea improved upon.

killerstorm2• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

https://bash-prompt.net/guides/wget-mirror-website/

danparsonson2• 3 years ago

https://www.httrack.com/ is a good option

mesarvagya• 3 years ago

Most of SPA websites today cannot be downloaded through httrack.

shagie9• 3 years ago

The entirety of the archive pre rework can be found at https://archive.org/details/c2.com-wiki_201501

dexen• 3 years ago

The C2 wiki was re-written and re-implemented as single page app, currently at 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

WesolyKubeczek• 3 years ago

But all the old content seems to be gone (or all links to it are broken)

ricardobeat• 3 years ago

Complete with unnecessary page transitions, cascading loaders and a ton of layout shifting. Classic SPA success story.

bongobingo1• 3 years 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.

manojlds• 3 years ago

Works bad on mobile with some weird transitions. Can't believe C2 is fallen to this trap as well.

gtirloni• 3 years ago

The C2 wiki was re-written and re-implemented as single page app, currently at http://fed.wiki.org/

It seems empty. Or am I not grasping what this is?

jacobsenscott• 3 years ago

I don't believe C2 was moved here. The Federated wiki seems to be Ward Cunningham's experiment - an answer to centralized wikis - also invited by Ward. It is interesting, but as far as I can tell not some kind of mirror of the content on C2. If you click "recent changes" a lot of stuff comes up, mostly about federated wiki.

imachine1980_• 3 years ago

holly cow this redisign is awfull, im not against federated content, but this inst a wiki at all

Zanfa3• 3 years ago

This is completely broken and unusable on latest iOS Safari.

insulanus2• 3 years ago

Sadly, I've had bad experiences with some Single Page Apps. Here are some problems I've had:

Linking to a specific topic.

Archiving the site.

SpaghettiCthulu• 3 years ago

Also routing breaking if you trigger back/forward too fast (looking at you, GitHub)

ilyt• 3 years ago

...that is fucking terrible.

Do they not know back button and tabs exist in browsers ?

fsckboy• 3 years ago

It is an interesting change, to a more federated style.

what does "federated" mean in this context? do you mean decentralized segmented "peer to peer" storage, or something?

unfederated wikipedia is not helpful in defining federated:

Federated content is digital media content that is designed to be self-managing to support reporting and rights management in a peer-to-peer (P2P) network. Ex: Audio stored in a digital rights management (DRM) file format. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federated_content

mananaysiempre2• 3 years ago

That’s certainly.... a definition of a thing. That I haven’t seen once in my life. In any case, the relevant page is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federation_(information_techno... .

The idea is essentially to follow the way email (and partly the Web) works: users aren’t tied to one server (centralized), but neither are they required to each run their own one (peer-to-peer), instead there’s a narrower group of server operators who host users, but those users can cause the server software to connect to a server it doesn’t know about if they mention it explicitly.

Of course, if the protocol is too weak in allowing the operator to control those connections (in either direction), it will evolve informal means for that which will make all but the largest servers extremely unreliable, much as email did. On the other hand, the experience of Mastodon shows the dangers of operators exercising too much control (where e.g. Mozilla seems eager to defederate with any server that has anyone post anything even slightly offensive or objectionable to anybody whose opinion Mozilla considers valid).

The federated wiki idea as promoted by Ward seems to be to have the federation (network of servers) be able to browse each other’s pages—so far so Web—but then to allow each user to clone and edit any page anywhere, storing the clone on their own server. The original page isn’t affected, except I think there’s a provision for some sort of backlinking (referral spam? what’s that?). It doesn’t sound unreasonable, but I’m not sure it can support anything interesting either—for a large pool of collaborators you’d need a Torvalds-like full-time merge BDFL, and I haven’t even seen a discussion of pull requests or anything similar.

forgetfreeman• 3 years ago

If you find inspiration in converting a raft of long-term usable URLs into a single page usability clusterfuck one questions your motives and your craft.

jimbosis• 3 years ago

Is there any way to see a running demo of tlb (or a real-life website)?

InvisibleUp2• 3 years ago

There was a mirror at 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• 3 years 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), 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?

InvisibleUp2• 3 years ago

Oh, it works now. Thanks!

For those reading the comments here, https://kidneybone.com/c2/wiki/CategoryCategory is a great place to start browsing.

waynecochran• 3 years ago

This is what I get

    page does not exist

lloydatkinson• 3 years ago

What happened?

LordShredda• 3 years ago

The web happened

amiga386• 3 years ago

Cool URLs don't change.

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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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/ far more atrocious, because with Microsoft and VMware it feels less tragic

sph• 3 years 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

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.

kevinmgranger2• 3 years ago

Is this a deliberate shutdown or just an outage?

qingcharles2• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

an incoherent blob of text arguing with itself.

Kinda like HackerNews but from before someone invented modern threading and quoting, yeah?

omoikane• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

layer82• 3 years 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?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. In particular, it has a working search page: https://kidneybone.com/c2/wiki/FindPage

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35952055 if you want to create your own mirror.

patal• 3 years ago

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

marttt2• 3 years 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://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.

Dwedit• 3 years ago

I just see a blank page.

aigoochamna• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

wow. New site is fucking awful. http://fed.wiki.org

What an abomination. JavaScript is ruining the internet.

Kelamir• 3 years ago

From the source:

  <center>
    <b>notice</b>
    <p>javascript required to view this site</p>
    <b>why</b>
    <p>measured improvement in server performance</p>
    <p>awesome incremental search</p>
  </center>

It does load faster now that it doesn't display anything.

pcunning4• 3 years 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.

joshuanapoli2• 3 years ago

Thank you; I'm glad that you're keeping c2 online.

wahnfrieden• 3 years ago

Make sure it gets archived by an archive team not just hosted thanks

pcunning4• 3 years ago

Recommendation of who to work with?

javcasas• 3 years ago

Can I suggest making it a torrent? Good Internet relics deserve to live duplicated in random computers all over the place, just like the Internet itself.

sunir3• 3 years ago

Now I’m curious. What happened to federated wiki?

I owe Ward stuff.

pcunning4• 3 years ago

Fed wiki is still the current project. This was entirely about the hosting for the original wiki.

msie• 3 years ago

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

thagsimmons• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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 a good place to start if you are curious.

skue• 3 years ago

It’s the original wiki (and coined the term):

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

btrower2• 3 years 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.

Come back, c2.com, we still need you

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