So, here is the link I promised above (Guest 18 may 9:04 a.m.).

From Ronan Nolan's excellent "Irish Music Web" site here:

http://www.irishmusicweb.ie/texts/sing_res.html

On his links page he gives the following description of Mudcat:

"Mudcat Discussion Forum Enviable British chatroom with lots of Irish content."

Anyone have any guesses as to why Ronan thought Mudcat, an American folk music forum, was actually a British folk music forum?

WARNING: Rant mode on!

It does seem to me that certain antagonistic British cyber-folk have a tendency to take over folk music forums online and try to run them into the ground with their mercenary anti-American flamewars. We saw it here with the Celtic Music/Bulmer threads, which pretty much ruined the rec.music.folk newsgroup. A couple of years ago, there were numerous knowledgeable American cyber folk contributors, most of whom fled in the wake of nasty, protracted flamewars instigated by certain British posters, directed at all things American--American musicians they claimed were stealing British musicians work and making millions, American posters in the group, what they still disparagingly refer to as "American snigger-songwriters."

Rec.music.folk is like a ghost town now. But uk.music.folk is thriving!

We seem to be seeing the same sort of thing seeping into the Mudcat forum. A handful of malicious British posters attempting to poison this and every other decent folk music discussion forum on the web with their vile anti-American crap. How many of the British protagonists in the Celtic Music/Dave Bulmer have contributed meaningfully and/or fairly consistently before or since those flamewars someone is clearly trying to start up again right now? Where are the folk music contributions to other threads of people like George H and Ralphie to the forum? Answer: they are non-existent. They came here with an incredibly nasty, divisive agenda--divided and conquered, and left.

So Ralphie--is it you trying to get the flamewars going again?

Rant mode off.