OK Joe. I'll take your word for it being possibly a real mudcat thing.
I guess that means we can't shun Tunesmith and make hime do purges and doses of nasty things to get all cleaned up, if he ain't really all dirtied; but how we gonna get 'm to write us some new blues if we're too nice.
I did make a point of trying the "front page" (www.mudcat.org) a few times, although I most nearly always come in at the /thread.cfm page. I got one failure in about a dozen tries; but it gave me the convenional "web page can not be opened" kind of message. I was tryin' to drive carefully but probably just collided with somebody else's packets.
I do recall getting one a couple of years ago here that was a nice little thing about "your packets collided with some others and yours lost," but it's been some time since I've gotten anything but the boring old "404," and recently that usually was a temporary thing that went away fairly quickly.