Dear all, thanks for your comments, I didn't expect such a huge response!

One or two points:
All the advice on using the search facilities and becoming a member and so on... this advice is very useful and will hopefully help people get more of what they want out of Mudcat.

My own comments were not from a position of ignorance, I work in humanities computing and I am fairly au fait with the way Mudcat works - I was a member ages ago but stopped using the site all that often (due to time-consuming browsing) and consequently forgot all my login details (oops!). My initial post was simply to let the organisers know that some people ARE put off by the structure, people like me, who have a great deal of interest and a lot to contribute.

What I'm trying to say is that I guess I am a user who likes a lot of relevance - I don't want to search through the sewing box, to revisit the first analogy, I want my coloured threads to be nicely organised. There's nothing wrong with these different perspectives, we're all different people, however, as pointed out above, those of you who are regular catters will tend towards the kind of person who DOES enjoy hunting.

I think that it's pretty clear that more users (at least who've posted here) prefer the thread structure the way it is, but my point of view is still valid - be aware that those of us who don't have time to logon every day, browse through hundreds of threads weekly, or do multiple searches will continue to slowly drift away from Mudcat, which is a shame for all concerned, isn't it?
I think that a 'subfolder' structure, whilst obviously not foolproof, would speed up focused browsing (which is very different from searching remember) without preventing the 'digging' which many people enjoy. But as I seem to be in the minority here, I won't push the point.

To the organisers of mudcat: I'm in awe of your massive acheivement in creating this online community and don't wish to belittle it, on the contrary, I hope that my presenting this minority opinion will help to improve Mudcat and increase its number of users.

One last thing - does the search support boolean operators as this would certainly speed up my searching, if not my browsing?

Thanks for your time,
Daisy