Perhaps Jon and Steve could take this to private mail or PM?

I agree that people who are unhappy with the forum should leave. The reason why so many of us stay is because there are only a few alternatives to Mudcat.

Re: rec.music.folk There are reasons why I don't like that alternative either. The advertising. The spam. The lack of knowledgeable people, although like Mudcat, there is a handful of truly knowledgeable people there too.

Re: Folk Alliance mailing list I'm a member of this one too. The focus of that list seems pretty narrow, and the content controlled too much by list owners.

For me, the happy medium would be a forum, whether mailing list, moderated newsgroup, or website forum, which has all posters accessing the forum in the same way (ie no member/guest thing, which just creates unnecessary problems, IMO). I don't share the sentiments of some who feel a private mailing list is elitist. Between Mudcat and rec.music.folk, newbies are pretty well served in the public Internet realm.

But for those of us with a more serious interest in discussing music, especially to have more scholarly, learned discussions of music without the BS, without the spam, without the advertising, without the domination of the performance questions (there are usenet forums for the instrument players for that purpose), without having to define folk music again and again and again ad nauseum, etc I think the best alternative is to look at beginning discussions about creating another forum.

For me, it isn't just about bitching and whining. I am still willing to give Mudcat a chance once the advance filtering system is brought in. But I still don't know how much that will improve the problem of thread hijacking. And what I mean by thread hijacking, is what was mentioned in regards to the History of Irish Traditional Music thread. I'm sure others can provide many examples of music threads getting hijacked by the BSers. Who I see are largely staying out of this conversation.