I've been off the boards for a LOONNNGG time - came back to look at Jonathan's Obit and found the new arrangement. I think it's great!

I've gotten involved with another discussion board. There are several things I really like about it:

1. It's divided into different "rooms" divided by topic, each with its own listing of threads in that room. There's a General room where threads both on and off topic are started. There's a "Games" room where threads like the Mudcat Tavern, virtual stories, etc take place. There's a "Tech Help" room. There's a separate forum for Political Discussions, to prevent arguments starting on the main board. You get the idea.

2. There's a volunteer moderator for each room who only steps in if he or she gets personal messages complaining about a flame war starting, or a grossly inappropriate thread. The moderator can "close" the thread to further posts.

3. Each thread is labelled with the title, the nom-de-Web of the person who started it and how many posts it has - with a counter to show you how many new posts have been added since you last logged in (a feature for members only). This is great, as it lets me click on threads started by a friend, skip over the sixty zillion threads started by the same person, etc. if I so desire.

4. In each Room, you can set how far back you want to see the threads. For Rooms where there isn't a lot of posting, you can set it for 1 week; for the General Room set it for 24 hrs, etc.

I would visit Mudcat more often if there was a similar structure - a room for Lyric or Tune Requests, a room for gig and CD release announcements, a room for Games like the Tavern, a Social room (it sounds so much nicer than "BS") for non-music discussions among our social group, and a general Music room for chat about everything vaguely musical - song origins, neat parodies you've discovered or written, instrumental techniques, 12 step programs for instrumentoholics, musical activism re PELs, etc.

Barring that (and I know it would mean a hell of a lot of work for Max, Jeff, Joe and all the other hard-working folks who try to take care of this unruly kingdom), I really like the separation of BS. How does it work, though?    Is it totally dependent on the honor system - counting on the person who starts the thread to label it BS? Does someone transfer a thread that is started in the non-BS section inappropriately?