"Mudcat remains as a beacon to true democracy"

Sorry, Frank but as much as I admire you personally, that has never been the stated purpose or mission of the DT or it's related music archive at Mudcat.

The intended purpose of the DT & Mudcat forum was to provide a free, searchable online music collection with a searchable archive of music-related posts to support it.

If people want community, they can find it at meet-up.com or Yahoo groups. They could go to Jon's Annexe. They could stay here, for that matter, so long as Max & Dick give the database and archive to someone who values it enough to do the right things with it.

Just release the DT database and music post archive to responsible people who actually care enough and have the ability to make it into something of value to the online music community. Instead of just an appendage to a forum community w/a very high SNR.

Everyone is right. I don't care about this forum, except for the DT & music related posts in the Mudcat archive. I care about genuine and authentic community, and the contempt posters here show for the greater online music community isn't a community value I share.

IMO, Max & Dick should give up their proprietary stranglehold over the resource, and turn it over to people w/open source database and wiki expertise, and a commitment to doing the job right and getting it done.

People here care more about their personal forum community than they do the DT, the Mudcat music archive, or the online and offline music community they claim here to represent. No surprise there.

So why not split the difference? Give the DT & music archive to someone who will do what it takes to get it up to snuff & maintain it at a level that reflects state of the art RDBMS, and commitment to open source wiki type values that allows all users to easily add, remove, or otherwise edit all content quickly and easily, without the need for registration.

Of course, I also know most Mudcat regulars don't have a clue as to what I'm even talking about. This is their one and only online destination, hence their fearful posturing, head in the sand attitude any time people start making suggestions like I am to take the toy away from the children fighting over.