The CloverProject was a direct ancestor of lily, written in C under UNIX, using a UDP-based client protocol. The project was started in 1989 by Heechee, who had grand plans for it, but nothing quite as grand as ConnectII.

The first client for it was written by ChristianRatliff and ThePrisoner in early 1990. The project eventually went idle in late 1990 as all the participants had other project, and nobody really saw the need to move away from CONNECT.

When CONNECT was shut down, Clover was dragged out of mothballs and rushed into production so the community could move over.

DevenCorzine started writing Phoenix during this time, and later renamed it to Gangplank.

ThePrisoner worked on the CloverLeaf client in the weeks shortly before Clover was shut down.

Ultimately, because of the lack of stability, lily was written. Briefly, there was a bot that ran between Clover and lily that allowed some discussions to be shared between the two, but it was shut down pretty quickly as the user base rapidly moved to lily.

Historical note: Clover used different namespaces for users and discussions, so it was possible to have a user and discussion with the same name. To distinguish the two, it was originally proposed that discussion names be prefixed with a +, because mh (a widely used mail system at RPI at the time) used this to indicate folder names. Instead, - was selected because it didn't require the shift key. Most users hated this convention, since it was not required in CONNECT, and when lily was created, the - was made optional.
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