Here are a few somewhat random comments from a middle guard Mudcat member (My first post as a guest in Aug 2004- stopped regularly posting in 2009 for reasons that I've shared several times and touched on to some degree below).

With regard to Will's question "what will we all look like and where will we all be in, say, ten years time? What of the 'Cat then?", it seems to me that unless there is an influx of "new blood" than Mudcat will still largely be nostalgic about its past [as a forum] as well as largely stuck in the past with regard to the music that it focuses on.

I suppose it is to be expected that a forum which focuses on folk music would be more interested in the past than in the present and the future. But isn't there some new contributions to folk music that can be studied and discussed or do people think that there can't be new developments in folk music? Perhaps that's true for British folk music, but British folk music and its Anglo-American folk music cousins aren't the only types of folk music in the world. If Mudcat intends to remain focused only on certain types of folk music, then that means that its participants probably won't expand as it loses it old participants for natural reasons and other reasons.

It seems to me that if Mudcat is to be more than it was and still is (a rather good resource for information about and lyrics of certain types of folk music), then it has to consider broadening its participants. Note that I wrote "participants" instead of "members".

Folks here won't be surprised that I continue to lament the almost total lack of People of Color who regularly post or even sporadically post to this forum. The almost total lack impacts the type of information, song choices, and even sometimes the accuracy of the information and lyric interpretations that are found on this site for certain types of music such as African American influenced Old Time music and African American Spirituals, and early Blues. It was good to see Mudcat increase its study of Caribbean music- largely thanks to MorwenEdhelwen1 & Q, but there's much more Caribbean folk music to be studies and discussed if there were people here who were interested in those genres of music.

Also, one of the things that I love/d about Mudcat was/is its playground rhymes threads. A large number of the contributors to those threads were guests. And from their comments, many of those guests were/are far younger than the average Mudcat commenter. However, to attract younger populations, Mudcat probably has to include video posting along with text commenting. Is Mudcat willing to do that?