So my wife asked me to get rid of everything on the Web site I'd built for her business except the front page, and to rework that to remove all references to everything that the business used to be about: the Christmas ornaments, the glassware, the candle holders. She's done with all of that. Eventually she would like to use it to show her fine art, of which we have a scanned photo of one painting. So I put it up in order to have at least some content there. This site that I was so proud of, on which I'd worked long, hard, arrg-smash-forehead-against-the-monitor hours, the site which had this nifty shopping cart I'd set up and these great product descriptions I'd written, is now gone. It broke my heart.
And then there's Christian Everythingians. Also a lot of work. Also gone.
That was an interesting ride during the handful of days it existed. Lots of people voted on it (and it was C!d four times), with the upvotes staying slightly ahead of the downvotes throughout. I only got one question about the propriety of including a certain group: a noder wondered whether Quakers should really be considered Christians. I'd thought they were -- at least, their origins were as a Christian splinter group, but I had no idea what they believed these days -- but shortly thereafter I got a message from a Quaker to please take him off the list because they pretty much aren't! My, the things one learns.
One noder said the list "disgusted" him, and was thankful that nobody he liked was on it. He later claimed to have been joking. Many people questioned whether such lists were appropriate at all on this site. Where will it end, they wondered? Isn't it ridiculous to label yourself like that? My fellow gods must have sympathized with their arguments (and I suspect they weren't charmed by the flood of similar nodes that started appearing) because in the midst of the Chatterbox debate, "Fill-in-the-blank Everythingian" nodes were branded as GTKY and the whole lot of them were deleted.
So I understand why these nodes are no more. They may be community-builders, but they are cumbersome and there's no good way to keep them in check and they don't "raise the bar" any. My wish for E2, then, is for some clever young developer to come up with an elegant way for noders to find others who have similar interests.
Me, I'm going to node about comics or pulp heroes or punk bands or something. I'm glad I made the effort to pull the list together, and for an all-too-brief moment it was all I could have hoped for and more. There were some happy surprises along the way (a great deal of support came from very public atheists, agnostics, and pagans, and people I'd never have guessed were Christians jumped at the chance to be included) as well as a few (very few) disappointments as some folks I'd have thought would be friendly or at least understanding turned hostile. But now it's done and gone, and it's not going to dominate my life here anymore. And that I like.