Hi, Praise - I suppose you notice that I repeat myself quite often. I have a text file with standard Forum and e-mail responses to the problems that crop up on a regular basis, and I know how to do blue clicky thingies in my sleep and in Technicolor. There's room for a lot of this kind of help from people. Although our guests sometimes do things that seem reeeeally strange to us, I would hope that Mudcatters would continue to be kind and patient toward them. Still, I really would like to understand why people put song requests in the Help Forum or in HTML practice threads - there must be a logic there, but I don't understand it.
I suppose it might be helpful to list a few good things Mudcatters could do:

• If a song request has no replies and it's getting down to the bottom of the Forum Menu, post a "refresh" message to bring it to the top. Four or five "refresh" messages in a row don't do any harm - the Joes or JoeClones® of the world will eventually get around to deleting them, if there's a need.
  
• If somebody asks for an e-mail reply to a request, try to send an e-mail reply, in addition to posting the response in the Forum - and be sure to include in your Forum message that you have replied by e-mail. Max has done a good job of reducing the number of generic "desparately seeking lyrics" requests (they never spell "desperate" right), but we still see some song requests lost in threads where they'll never have a chance of being answered. If you see that, start a new thread with a good title, and copy the request message over into the new thread. If you can, post a message in the old thread, directing people to the new one.
  
• If you see duplicate messages or problem HTML, post a message about the problem in the Help Forum, so Joe or the JoeClones® can find it. If you are able to take care of the problem somebody else noted, post a reply in that Help Forum thread, saying that you've taken care of it.
  
• Stop in at the Help Forum and help answer questions. I usually stop there every day and take care of things, but I wouldn't mind sharing the burden. I guess the registration problems have to be handled by Max or me, since we're the ones who have access to registration information.
  
• Keep an eye out for songs and tunes that have been posted, but that have not appeared in the Digital Tradition Database - put a link to such songs in a general thread that lists unharvested songs - I think the most recent such thread is titled "songs you've posted" - it would be a good idea to resurrect that thread, rather than starting a new one. If a song is marked by a birdie ( ^^ ), that means it has been "harvested," and will appear in the database if the Powers That Be so deign. Also being experimented with is a three-winged birdie ( ^^^ ) to mark posted songs that are already in the database (the extra wing is redundant, and that may or may not mean that posting the song was redundant - sometimes, Dick and Susan decide that 53 versions of Child Ballad #316 are quite enough).
  
• If you're posting lyrics, follow the Digital Tradition Format - title in all caps, songwriter in parentheses in the second line, no indents, notes and your initials and any other helpful information at the end of the lyrics. If you like, you can include the DigiTrad categories your song fits (with @ at the beginning of each category name), alternate titles for the song, and names of related songs and Child or Laws or DT numbers.
  

Well, I think that's a pretty good start. If you want to help, try to do so in a friendly way, and without appearing condescending. The latter borders on being impossible. If you know something somebody else doesn't or can do something somebody else can't, that somebody is very likely to think you condescending, even if you have the humility of Gandhi - I know that from personal experience.

-Joe Offer®-