Stilly River Sage wrote: There is a subscription service at the Internet Archive called Archive It, but I don't know if that would serve.

Archive It FAQ
I don't think it's appropriate. It's aimed at organisations. Certainly it would be expensive.

The Web Archive aka the Wayback Machine is a set of incomplete snapshots of the mudcat website at different moments over the years. If mudcat disappears if would be totally impracticable to reconstruct it from these glimpses.

In some ways mudcat - the discussion threads anyway - would be easy to archive. It's not very dynamic, though posts can and do change. Stuff mainly gets added - it's a big ever-growing heap. Just save the new or amended posts periodically - weekly or monthly - to a read-only database. Store the data in the cloud, e.g. in AWS S3. A search facility could be added for when mudcat is down or only once it's clear that mudcat is never coming back up.

But it couldn't be done without Max's agreement and cooperation - it's his website. And it needs someone, or preferably a group of people, to do it and fund it, maybe through crowdfunding.

I don't know anything about how mudcat is run. But it's obviously unreliable and it does concern me that people are spending a lot of effort posting lyrics and things into it, maybe under the impression that it'll be available for posterity.