Right now, as has been pointed ouit, there are a number of active threads about American Traditional Music of one sort or another; and over the years there have of course been many many more, including some about the less visited varieties mentioned by the mystery GUEST who started this thread, and they are still there to be read and often enough continued.

But of course for a newcomer to this forum it's not that easy searching out stuff like that. And that ties in with what Azizi was mentioning - it'd be very easy to get the impression from just looking at the active threads at any time that the Mudcat is only about a pretty limited range of music, and that the Mudcat community is made up of people who are only interested in a pretty limited range of music. And I think that would be a false impression.

I wonder if it'd be possible to develop be some easier way for helping overcome this, and make the place more welcoming to people with particular interests in types of folk music that aren't on display at times. Some kind of broadbrush index system. With the task of searching out and listing the threads taken on by people with a focus on some type of music or whatever, and a permathread or some kind of menu to bring them all together.