I'm really ambivalent about this, as a new Mudcatter.

On the one hand, the setup is very simple. So simple in fact that when I'm at work, the site isn't recognised by our corporate servers as a "social networking, discussion group or personal site" and is therefore not blocked.

So I can look at it at lunch times and when I take a coffee break, unlike almost all the other sites I use :-). And it's packed full of so much information (as long as you can find it)!

On the other hand, I do find the user interface antediluvian...even more so than, say, the Compuserve Forums I used to use back in the late 1980s. Therefore encouraging young people to use it may prove very difficult. My elder daughter took one look and said, "bleugh, I'm never going there again".

So I have this image of the user community here ageing and eventually dying out with little or no young blood coming in, which I think will be a great shame. Youngsters simply will not use the site in significant numbers. I fully agree with Tom F on that.

I appreciate the problems of operating and maintaining a resource/ discussion site like this on a voluntary basis as I ran sites for a "Learned Society" and for a climbing club myself for several years back in the mid 90s...but I do wonder how many people under 40, or even under 50, are members here, or use the site regulary?