As to much better resources than Mudcat on the web, the list is now fairly extensive:

English folk and traditional music on the Internet

A list of bazillions of chat sites for all kinds of music

Traditional Music Links page

Since the DT is mostly an Anglo American song database, there are plenty of other resources online for the non-Anglo oriented:

Alan Ng's excellent site

the wonderful Gaelic Crossings site which has pretty active pure drop chat forums

Richard Moon's tune database (a beautifully designed site). He even has links to click on to show how to contribute and help with the database! Imagine that, someone who actually invites people in to help rather than ignores them and collects their money like Max does!

The excellent (and my personal current fave) tradmusic.com

Anyone who thinks Mudcat is the best the web has to offer for traditional, folk, and blues music and related chat is either addicted to this website, or too lazy to look at all the vast richness the web has to offer that is far superior to anyting here.

And has been for a couple of years now.