"I haven't a clue what most of the above is about" - I'm with Mooh on that.

If there is another place on the net which begins to compoare with the Mudcat - well I was going to say, I'd love to know about it. But I need to do other things sometimes as well as sit at my keyboard, so perhaps it's better that I don't know such a place.

With 200 million sites or whatever the current figure is, there has to be something, I'd have thought - but all the newsgroups I've ever come up against seem to make the Mudcat seem like an oasis of peace and tranquillity and good nature, even when we are at our worst.

As for the kind of organising features that Jon Freeman talks about, when I come across them on something like uk.music.folk, well, I tend to find they get in the way, though they can be convenient sometimes when you are in a hurry. (I haven't been to uk.music .folk for some time, because my ISP wouldn't support news groups until recently - and the Mudcat is so uch more accessible. Among other more important advantages.)

For me - I find thread drift is often a very positive thing, like its equivalent when you are round a table in a pub. (I don't say that in order to start an argument, because I can see how some people prefer the other way of doing it.)

It'd be fun though if there was a Mudcat equivalent somewhere which was primarily about the kind of things which at times get frowned on here. We could go along and talk about folk music and see if we got jumped on as deviationists.