There are many good aspects of the mudcat forum and it is at its best when it is dealing with factual information.

It does tend to operate like a gentleman's club in 1920s London and is a very unwelcoming place for newcomers. The assumption of Artful Codger that every one should expert and diligent enough to have dug the information out before taking the inconsiderate step of asking for something that is already available is one of the prevalent attitude which scares newcomers off in droves. I certainly know more people who have been scared off than stayed around, some now browsers only.

Mudcat isn't straightforward to use but it does reward the person who put the effort in to learn its idiosyncratic ways. If we want new faces at mudcat.org then it needs to encourage a more approachable attitude, to help people over the doorstep.

To portray the like button as simply a voting mechanism on facebook is to miss the point entirely. It is used that way in some cases, but this wouldn't apply on mudcat as there isn't enough traffic to make voting work. It is a mechanism which gives people another way of traversing the information by following friends like links, and it does give a voice to those people who can't muster a post, an insipid voice, but still a voice.

Nobody is looking for a "reality TV" function and a like button would simply not work that way.

Maybe a like button isn't the way to go, but something needs to be done to make mudcat less exclusive. I've missed many wonderful posts because a thread got bogged down in an arguement between the bigots in the corner and I wasn't prepared to wade through the vitriolic rubbish to find the nuggets. A like button just might let me find some of those and stand of the shoulders of people who did the wading already.

Anything that tones down the "gentleman's club" of mudcat without changing its character would be an asset to the forum

Simon