No flame, a response, though Mudcat as a community has wrestled with this for ages. But your post was thoughtful and I will respond I kind, even if flames may yet occur.

If by silly stuff you mean Catspaw's posts, I think an object of them was to point out how we need to be more careful about creating a multiplicity of threads. In the long run, his posts and the tension-releasing responses will help make Mudcat more suitable for research inquiries. Maybe you aren't aware that behind the scenss, discussions are always being held about how to make things better... today, Spaw's and others' posts are the best we have for showing the problem-- while we, as a community, continue to think through the solutions.

But Mudcat is always going to have an atmosphere of people being themselves... or Max would have named it "The Mudcat Very Serious Library (Ssssh!).

I am imagining a scene. It's Appalachia, a front porch. One song collector turns to another and says, "If only I could get Uncle Billie to quit spitting tobacco juice when I try to take his picture! It isn't seemly!" Nope-- they'd be enjoying Uncle Billie for the character he is.

Or the collectors have adjourned to their home base and are regaling their pals with stories from the field. Never uttering a colorful word themselves. Nope-- they'd be laughing their asses off.

My point is, this is not a collection of master's theses here-- those are extremely valuable, but they are at university sites and what we do here is, sometimes, discuss and study them , or share what we have learned from them or our own experience and scholarship. The theses appear there in complete grammatical correctness, stiff as boards.

This here... it's got some of that, but also some of the tavern talk, some of the people BEING collected...

It's a place where people get to BE the folk process, as well as HEAR about it.

~Susan