Melissa: It surprises me to see talk of prettying-up the site to look more appealing to younger folks. The info/discussion/music here isn't mainstream and I guess it strikes me as strange to think of Mudcat looking like a trendy mainstream site.

Very few people are talking about prettying it up. It's the CLUNKINESS that's putting off young people (the young people who *aren't* into mainstream music but who nevertheless expect a certain level of performance from their technology...such as auto-linking and auto-quoting).

Those youngsters are hypothetical.
Is there anything wrong with having a site that's comfortable to most of the members who are here now?

.....I'm in no hurry to see the discussions filled up with cute little smileys, flyby text-talk and teenage code. I prefer conversations that involve full words and complete sentences.

Well there are loads of threads here bemoaning the fact that young people don't seem to appreciate folk music, or that very few youngsters attend sessions, etc. Some of my posts above point out that there *is* a constituency of youngsters that are into this type of music, but that they don't find the "scene" very welcoming (whether on-line or offline). So they're off doing their own thing, when with a *little* effort at welcome from those of us already there, they'd happily embrace the traditions.

And the ones I'm referring to aren't into text-talk, fly-bys etc anyway. In fact *I* used "txt spk" on my mobile phone many years ago, when there was no predictive text and you were limited to 128 characters in an SMS. I also used it in dial-up Bulletin Boards back in the 80s, again, to save time/ bandwidth. A lot of it derives from telex shorthand. My kids find it *quaint*...they use full words and sentences on their phones, for example, because predictive text makes it easier to do that than painstakingly enter, say, C U L8r!

Tom F: ...however, my main point continues to center on the matter of whether MudCat wants to appeal to a younger, computer literate generation.

In some ways, they're *less* computer literate than those of us who've been using computers for 30+ years. That's why they're looking for automated linking and auto-quoting (ie differentiating a quote from a previous message automatically rather than, as I've had to do here, go through putting in HTML tags). They mainly don't even know of HTML, for instance, whereas my generation of computer-users is generally quite comfortable with it, because we *had* to use it in the early days.

Maryrrf: Links aren't automatic, but it doesn't take a genius to do a blue clicky, and for those who can't manage it - it's rare that another catter doesn't step in and fix it for them. Mudcat isn't mainstream or trendy - so be it. I rather like our cozy little community, and I don't see why anybody would be deterred by the format.

That's a bit of an "argument from incredulity". My daughter is definitely deterred by the clunkiness and what she pervceives as "user unfriendliness". She simply finds things like embedding HTML tags, having to actually "make" a link, and the very crude search facilities extremely frustrating...I was just getting: "why? That's crazy....everywhere else in the universe just embeds links automatically".

Imagine yourself as a driver, used to getting into your car and turning a key to start it (or, often these days, putting a card in a slot and entering a code). Then you're faced with a car where, to get it to run, you have to open the bonnet (hood), prime the carburettor, position the exhaust valve lifter, manually set the piston locations then close the bonnet and go around to the front of the vehicle, insert a cranked handle into a slot and turn over the engine by hand to start it. All while it's raining hard. Fine for a laugh, but you wouldn't want to have to do it every time you wanted to make a journey, when every other car you know of starts with a simple key turn.

That's what using this site feels like to them. They're absolutely NOT after glitz,and I see poster after poster above making this "straw man" arument. I can't see anywhere where people above advocating change have suggested making the site "whizzy" or "trendy"...just useable to people who expect a certain level of automation in their technology.

The "cozy little community" is fine now, but if it doesn't attract younger people, it'll die, like all the Newsgroups I used to use did, as people drifted away. The Newsgroup "rec.climbing.uk" used to be a vibrant community...then the younger ones moved over to "ukclimbing.com" as it was easier to use the forums there. The middle-aged ones missed the youngsters and mainly followed, leaving a rump of "don't see why we need to change" people who eventually, one by one, abandoned the group as the traffic diminished to the level where it wasn't worth looking at more than once every couple of weeks. Then not at all. Very sad, as the thread histories there contained a wealth of useful information.