We've tried various schemes for indexing threads. We've done a number of PermaThreads to index various threads, and I once had people supply a few thread indexes which were posted in the FAQ. WYSIWYG has done a pretty good job of maintaining and updating the African American Spirituals PermaThread, but most of the other indexing PermaThreads have fallen by the wayside as time goes along. It is a lot of work to maintain and update an index, but it can be a wonderful opportunity for anyone who wants to do it. If you want to set up a PermaThread for just about any worthy folk music project, contact me and I'll be glad to help.

Our most successful thread indexing effort has been our crosslink system that Jeff has set up for us. We have the Song Origins and Information list available in our dropdown QuickLinks menu, but the other master lists of crosslinks haven't been made available because we haven't heard a demand for them.

If you click on any thread on a given topic, you can often find other threads on the topic by looking at the crosslinks at the top of the page. You can also view individual thread groups by using this URL and changing the last number:
http://www.mudcat.org/threadgroup.cfm?threadgroupid=2
Using that, you can go through our groups one after another - but we haven't got around to building indexes for anything but the song groups. If there's an interest, I can ask Jeff if he can builde other indexes. Right now, our crosslink master groups are:

• Song Origins & Info
  
• General Instrumental
  
• Guitar
  
• Keyboards / Piano / Organ
  
• Miscellaneous Music Topics
  
• Miscellaneous Non-music
  
• Mudcat Lore
  
• Music Festivals
  
• Music Theory
  
• Music: Political & Business Issues
  
• Musicians / Performers / Composers
  
• Other Instruments
  
• Singing / Vocals
  
• Songs - Other
  
• Sound Equipment & Recording
  
• Stringed Instruments (Not Guitar)

My main interest is indexing songs, and I probably spend at least an hour a day on that. As you can see, we have lots of groups in our Song Origins index. While I'm working on that index, I try to consolidate threads when that makes sense, and close or delete old dead-end song threads that just ended in directions to a DT song or directions for searching. Most of the other master thread groups are reasonably small, so I don't think there's a real need for indexing those groups (except for possibly our "Musicians / Performers / Composers" master group).

-Joe-