Well, that really sounds like a big nope from the regulars. For me, the only real reason not to have ratings is 'cause it might be an administrative nightmare.

I guess I just have a couple more points to make:

Asking everyone to form their own opinions about other posters over time is itself elitist and clique-ish; few people have time to check out old postings or to keep up with postings in general, thereby knowing who to trust. Smart trolls aren't always obvious. Smart readers aren't always feeling smart and can be fooled. Spaw? I'm not offended by cheerfully rude people like Spaw; he ain't trying to screw with my mind or make me feel smaller.

Second, some people do take the stuff that they read here very seriously, for instance in the thread: http://www.mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=25365 Someone says: Subject: RE: BS: Mind-Changing at Mudcat? From: Marion Date: 14-Sep-00 - 09:32 PM ... I have become much more reticent about singing my original songs, because now I think people may be muttering "another girl singing her diary".

Marion got some encouragement furthur along in the thread, but there is no furthur posting from her to indicate that she read the encouragement. I don't have time to check out her postings in other threads. Instead I have written to her:

(intro. cut)

I hope you don't still feel that way. Yes, of course, most of your songs probably aren't as good as the old folk tunes we love. As Art Thieme said, the song isn't good because it's old, it's old because it's good. But that's not the point. The point is that people like to hear what's on the mind of other people; they like to feel connected with other people. When you perform your own songs, you can probably put more emotion into the performance and people can probably feel more connected to you.

My girlfriend likes to ask me how my day went. What I usually want to say is that nothing very interesting happened. But she still likes the details (or claims to, until I sometimes get carried away). And she *loves* to relate the details of her day. The mundane things connect us.

Odetta says she sings other people's songs because she doesn't want to reveal too much of herself by singing her own. I guess she just wants better control over what she reveals. Odetta sings old songs well, but she'll never be as popular as people who sing new material. Sometimes I think that people who stick to old folk are all simply shy.

If you feel like, hey, my songs are all just variations of songs that have been written before, all I can say is, there's some truth in that, but when you sing them, the audience sees them as special because they happened to the woman who's right in front of them.

Steve