Periodically, we hear from the organizers trying to think of ways to keep new blood coming into MudCat to combat it's occassional incestuous nature. Then we hear from those new people who are leaving because they find the site difficult to use, and the same old regulars saying the like it the way it is. Perhaps there's a happy medium.

Imagine going to a grocery store. Every item is labelled exactly the same way, in the same size box of the same white color with the same blue font on it. The location of the boxes are entirely dependant upon the previous customers moving things around at random. That's what MudCat is like. If you like to pick your food off the shelf at random, or if you want to pick up every single box and study it, you'd be happy. But most of us go to the grocery store with lists of what we definately want, and then we browse the aisles for other items as we go by.

I've made suggestions in the past that could accomodate multiple browsing styles without significant reprogramming or restructuring, which could also reduce the workload on the clones. They've been ignored (or silently rejected), so there's no point in retyping them here. But I can say predict with 100% surety that rearranging the prefixes again will fail, simply because a) it hasn't worked before and b) no one uses them the same way, if at all.

One needn't be bashing MudCat to make constructive suggestions. If Max and the clones don't ever want unsolicited suggestions, then they should clearly say so and delete any threads that have a tiny bit of critical content. Since they haven't done so, it seems safe to assume that they ARE interested in input, and jumping down the throats of people who dare have a different opinion is couterproductive, at best.