I really can't see why anyone should feel excluded by Mudcat. It seems to me that the organisers of this site are very open and fair-minded people (I, on the other hand, am a curmudgeonly old purist who likes a good scrap - but that's my problem!).

As to why certain people don't use this site - well, remember the old adage, "you can take a horse to water, but you can't make it drink (and it's a waste of time trying)". I'm reminded of a similar situation where I live. The local authorities seem to be consumed with anxiety because they believe that people from ethnic minorities don't use local green spaces. Actually they do, but they use them differently: they tend to hold family based picnics, occasionally, when the weather is good, and don't bother filling in silly council surveys. The 'natives', on the other hand, go in for lots of obsessive jogging and dog walking. Perhaps, on this site, 'Jug Band enthusiasts', or whatever, dip in and out and tend not to contribute to obsessive debates/slanging matches about 'what is folk music' (like what I do).

As for G the D's "Result 3", about people being upset by rude people, yes, there are rude people on this site but there are far too many over-sensitive people who interpret any challenge to their precious opinions as 'rudeness'; if you contribute to a public debate you must expect to encounter differences of opinion. Lots of people disagree with me, and are sometimes rude to me, but I'm not really bothered by those things and consider rudeness to be a sign of poorly thought through opinions.