Here's what I think happened.

Mudcat Profiles started long before it became standard practice in web boards to have a profile you could get by clicking the members' name in their posts. Nowadays in most boards, the profile is a form you fill out when you join, and then you can choose to make it open or closed. Our equivalent to this was that you could click a memberna,e and get all their old posts-- you'd get the peson in their own words, not a short form filled out. Very few people had profiles here at Mudcat, and even by the time I joined, late in MudDev, most of the profiles were from the perfroming pro's among the membership.

So I think that at Mudcat, profiles served a different purpose than they do now on boards-- such as putting up the ICQ ID that was needed then for Mudcattish chats, but also (IMO more important) making a a place to talk about (promote) your music. Remember, at its inception Mudcat was on the cutting edge, but now we have universal webmania. When the Cat started there were a lot of folks with no idea how to use a PC for more than the most basic purposes. It was handy that professional musicians among Catters could make a profile and give the URL to it, in their PR, if they had not yet developed a website.

Nowadays people are much more sophisticated about developing their own web content, and it's easy to get and build your own free site. If you want a "profile" now, as they have been at Mudcat, you can just assume anyone looking for info on you will Google you up in short order.

~Susan