I didn't read all of the replies to this but isn't there a way to just identify the non-registered inputters so those of us who don't want to bother with unregistered inputs can flip past them? Is that what a posting labeled GUEST means?

It concerns me that so many people are spending so much time worrying over this when they could be listening to or playing or learning or sharing music. Myself included! Why am I spewing my thoughts today instead of cranking up the old autoharp or improving my note-reading? I have about a thousand dollars worth of songs I've never played, gathering dust on my bookshelf! I could be learning MIDI and hearing some of those songs right in this site instead of reading them!

I this happens for the same reason we mere humans do a lot of things-- we get lonely and we look for like-minded people to be with, and sometimes we get carried away in that... if we were in person, though, we wouldn't do it so extensively. Someone would get sick of it and start a new tune, and we'd remember why we came. Some of this is just part of the new addiction to surfing that is carrying a lot of good time down the drain. It doesn't have to be porn to be a damaging addiction.

Here's a suggestion, I am going to go try it nowmyself-- I'm going to log off this addicting machine and addicting conversation, and go put a CD on, and next time I log on I'll try to remember if the music affected how I feel about the issues raised in this thread and others like it that I skimmed through today. And I bet that the lyric someone sent me for Tubas in the Moonlight will stay with me longer than this side issue.

Mudcat does not have to choose to endorse its members and users and abusers dwelling on difficult-to-solve material. Members who care about the site's effect on people can affect people by just redirecting all of us when necessary to the better things in life such as the mucivc that brought us here. let's help each other do that instead of staring into our organizational navel longer than the size of it would support!

I think what I am saying is, take two tunes and call me in the morning.

Speaking of which, I don't have sound on this computer yet at all. Does the site play tunes while you're visiting it, automatically? If not, maybe that would be a simple way to lift us all above the level of these little problems.