(Certain words in the following are capped not to indicate emphasis or emotion, but becasue they are the names of certain Mudcat features.)

What I am recalling is that there are often ideas coming along for new prefixes for threads, and people saying "Max ought to make it like this" or "that," while we don't all use the ones we have, and never will, because the program doesn't reject un-prefixed titles, and aren't you glad of that really?

My suggestion was to put them in the LINKS section instead of in the threads because the LINKS don't fall off the page or have to be fetched, they are just there. It is an under-utilized feature of Mudcat. And the really nice thing is, we can edit things in the LINKS pages for ourselves... if a venue changes, by closing, moving, changing format, or changing a web or e-mail address, we can take it out or fix it without asking a volunteer to do it, and thus we are not stuck with outdated listings that will make people nuts in a year or two's time. Remember, threads are forever, but little else is.

You would not have to go search up old threads.... you would solicit new ones by example and catch the links to those threads as they are created. You'd be the volunteer(s) who care enough to set the thread word filter on your prefix or the word VENUE, and the list filter for, say, seven days' worth of threads in case you had missed a few; then you'd paste the URLs to venue-type threads into LINKS. It's real easy in fact to do that. Now you have visible data.

The titling and management of these however you do it will be a monster, and that's why I recommended looking at Mojam. It will give you stuff in an hour's radius of the location you specify. Just imagine having it in threads though.... Say I am going to Chicago. The metro area is huge. Am I going to be willing to drive from one suburb to another? Yes. Some of them. I know the area well enough to know which.... But I would have to see the names to choose from.... I might be one town over from someone I am dying to see and never know it because there are too many suburbs to search by name... now, if a thread or LINKS listing says Chicago Area Venues, I'll go see it. But no.... the one I want was titled that day as "FV: Doc Watson in Bungee." Bungee has about twelve people in it... I'd never think of seaching on Bungee!! (There ain't any Bungee in Chicago, BTW, I borried it from PA for an example.)

But my suggestion of JUST DO IT is that you can start using it right now, as a thread prefix, by typing it in. And see if it works like you hope it will, or if there will be problems... testing the water, see, before desiging a system based on how you think it will work, when it actually works some other way.

See if anyone follows suit for a certain period of time to see if the idea is worth asking Max to make the change. For example for a few days people were using POL to indicate political arguments. I mean attempts at discussion. You know. THREADS. It didn't catch on. (I liked it... I was going to set up a filter to exclude them like we can filter out BS threads. So I was sad it didn't fly, and sure enough I got my panties in a wad by falling into one I wish I could have filtered out.)

But the ideas here assume people will go along.... and that is something that seldom happens here at Mudcat. Look at What's On.... are people using it?

We had FYI/NEWS for a couple of days too. Maybe it will come back. It was too long but it was a good effort.

So how about piloting your idea now with a couple of FV threads and see what happens? And BTW you will want to abbreviate it--- FOLK VENUES will take up most of your title space, which is limited to a certain length so thread titles fit WebTV.

I really don't care how you resolve your idea, you know-- it is after all your idea. I just don't appreciate you assuming I am trying to be mean about it. I just don't see enough of what YOU will do compared to what you assume OTHERS will do. And Mudcat is not the only place where I have learned that things don't actually work that way, even with the best ideas.

~Susan