Well, I agree with both of you - or I don't agree with either of you, whichever you prefer! I think the experience of the Lewes Arms club shows that it's not necessary to explicitly ban or discourage bad performers, but also shows that it is necessary to have quite a lot of peer pressure, in the shape of a lot of good performers. On another thread you (Snail) objected to the idea that you discourage bad performers, but I think that is what you do - not directly, simply by putting on a lot of good performers who they're forced to compare themselves with.

A couple of singarounds I've been to. In one, most of the singers play guitars; most of the material is by Dylan, McTell or Gordon Lightfoot, or by the singer him- or herself. A few people use song-sheets; nobody joins in on choruses, or not without a lot of prompting.

In the other, there are only a couple of guitars, and only a couple of songsheets. Trad song follows trad song, ranging from club standards to newly-arranged obscurities, and everyone pitches in on the choruses.

If singaround 1 doesn't have some sort of quality policy, its quality is likely to suffer - if "Dylan off a songsheet" is OK, what's wrong with "a song I've just written and haven't learnt yet off a songsheet"? And if that's OK, what's wrong with "a song I've just written and I may get the chords wrong so bear with me"?

If singaround 2 doesn't have a quality policy, so what? No one in their senses is going to follow Come Write Me Down, Glorious Ale and Seeds of Love with "a song I've just written [etc]".

In other words, I suspect that clubs that don't have a problem with quality are also clubs where traditional material dominates and where participation's expected; that way, the standard maintains itself, or is maintained by the regulars.