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Comment by 10ren | Hacker News Reader

I've found c2 wiki very interesting, mainly for XP related stuff (eg criticism of the Visitor pattern; do the simplest thing that could possibly work) - but it's not a public wiki, because you can't contribute without a password, which only the select have (no idea how they got it.)

Reading it reminds me of a mailing list archive of intelligent discussion. Haphazard, sequential, with links only at times. There are very insightful thoughts tucked away in there, but it takes a lot of reading and tracing to find them - and then you can't find them again without going through the same process. It's abysmal, labyrinthal, like some of my prototype projects.

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You can't contribute without a password? Every time I've been there, they've had the world's most half-assed captcha ("the password is [three-digit number], type it in the box"). I had no idea I was so elite.

There's a lot of great content, buried in a lot of random rambling. (And some of it is mine, sorry.) It's like HN, but without hueristic fading for old threads, and with a culture focused on software-engineering rather than startups.

This was years ago. I must have had bad luck to have wanted to edit 'special' pages, that don't supply the code. I assumed that was the general rule, which the help page seemed to confirm:

> When no code word is given, you may use an alternative code word that floats along among trusted users. There is no way to apply for this code. Try your friends-of-friends network. Remember that this code and the mechanism itself will change if abused. http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?MoreAboutCodes

I just checked what you said, and the above seems to be (now?) the exception, and most pages do supply the code. A surprise to me, good to know, thanks!

It was probably only enforced for pages that got a lot of vandalism, during heavy slashdotting, etc. It's definitely the exception rather than the rule.

There was times where the digit was written, other times where the digit wasn't. Only some people got the password then by word of mouth.

Ward was really willing to do something that could work for blind people as well and there wasn't really audio captcha at that time.

In my mind it didn't work really well as the community was too large, and as a wiki require a great deal of people to have it maintains such a large wiki it essentially collapsed under it's own weight and word of mouth never arrive to me (I was just a lone french with no connexions )

Not knowing whether you were going to be able to modify or not modify it at a time was also very annoying.

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