Depending on which server you visit the server’s message of the day (motd) often talks about a clan or community. People appear to be using these two terms as if they had the same definition. For multiplayer gaming on a computer, a community is a group of players who regularly play together in a particular (or various different) multiplayer games such as Team Fortress 2, Counter Strike Source, Call of Duty 4 or Command and Conquer. These games range from groups of a few friends to 1000-person organizations, with a broad range of structures, goals and members. The lifespan of a community also varies considerably, from a few weeks or months to several years. Numerous communities exist for nearly every online game available today, notably in first-person shooters, massively multiplayer games, role-playing games, and strategy games.
Most Communities attempt to create a fun and friendly environment where gamers of all ages and experiences can get together and share their interests in gaming and gaming related topics by various means of communication such as php , vbulletin, or fireboard discussion forums and live voice channels such as team speak or ventrillo.
A clan on the other hand tends to be like a community, but with a big difference. Clan’s tend to be small groups of people that all know each other and play the same games for the most part. In a community you have people that have no clue who all the members are. Clan’s are normally people that also participate in tournaments as a team either lan related or league related.

Who cares? Well when you’re challenged to by another clan and they tell you that their clan will show up in groups of 55 to their 60 slot server so your 5 can go up against their clan number divisible by 55 this tends to be an issue. Does this always happen? No. That was a rare instance.
You can still have both a clan and a community. Take for example professional e-sports clans. There are normally made up of 5 people. But they have a community they belong to as well. This does not mean because I’m in the forums I’m a clan member. This is where the difference is clearly seen.
Good examples of gaming communities are: Strafe Right (www.straferight.com ), Digital Decimation (www.digitaldecimation.net ), and Fusion Gaming (www.official-fusion.com ). These are people that have numbers that are in the low hundreds to tens of thousands of participating players. Currently however they don’t play in any leagues and for the most part. They host (or at one point did host) several servers where majority of the players played in their part of the virtual community. Most of these communities have internal clicks within them and it works like the lunch table at a high school but it’s a system that works.

However there are people that get the concept wrong because they confuse the words together. Take for example Freaking New Guys (www.fngclanonline.com) these nice bunch of kids have a small community that they call a clan. It takes a bit of digging but you can see the difference. When you have people from a community and try to develop a team to play competitive you run into several problems. The first one being you can’t just pair up your best players and force them to communicate. The other problem is then lack of interest. If you look up their information they have attempted CAL but sometime after the third week they FF lose all their matches.

Again the question comes to who cares? The point is you can have a clan and a community, but they don’t mean the same thing. Just because I join the 3DNY steam group does not mean I’m CGS. A few of you that do still go to pubs, see sometime people using fake names and using the fact that their name is listed either on a steam community or on a webpage that is merging clan players and forum players together. Just play and stop pretending. Sheesh!

http://www.legit-proof.com/articles/view/22