Mudcat has always been a part of me. I was 24 when I started it. I'm not pleased to be in and out such as I have been over the years, but I am but one flawed man trying to raise some kids, keep a job, maintain meaningful relationships and keep a pretty cool web site up and running. Good enough at most of it, to just get by.

I've been accused of working on features that weren't a priority, but stand by choices. I am simply trying to make the mudcat more accessible for me. After all, if I'm not interested in it, it doesn't exist.

Before being sidetracked by our current annoyances, I was working on being emailed whenever a thread-in-my-tracer was added to or when someone sends me a PM. Mudcat is overwhelming for most, I think. An ocean of content and conversation delivered by fire hose if tried to take as a whole, as I feel burdened to.

Those of you who have met me know where my heart is, and that I'd like to have more time for it, as an administrator and community member. I thought too that if I were able to earn a certain amount of money from it that it would justify a greater commitment. For some reason, up until at least a trip to the UK, it was taboo for me to even imply that any money ended up in my pockets or to my mortgage payment.

I'm not telling you all this to try to get sympathy or support, merely making the point that the mudcat is a part of me, it spans my entire adult life. The one constant through multiple careers, marriages and countless moves and mental states. It clearly provides me something I need, whether it a sense of responsibility or pride or accomplishment or tenacity. Or perhaps it's just the connection to you all that I need. I think I insist on keeping the server in my home is meaningful. If my power is out, as it was for 5 days in October '09, neither of us could enjoy mudcat. I might have grown resentful of you if you had.

I know there are a whole lot of folks who do a whole lot of work, and I am quite grateful. They, like me, don't get any more reward than the very thing that they invest their time in shaping. I'm surprised sometimes that any of us are willingly making that deal. And there are a whole lot of folks that contribute content, hours of research, heart breaking honesty, babies being born, lovers being lost, bodies and minds diminishing, their final days lived out before us. So mudcat is not just me, and although I wax on as if it were, I am humbled by my place in it. I created it, just to have a place in it.

I'm trying lately to reinvest in it. While many of you don't see me post often, I exchange emails with at least one of you a couple time a week, and the vols and I are always in dialog. Every few months they'll tell me that I need to make an appearance and put my foot down on this or that, or try to correct the tone or attitude that has turned dark. Breaks my heart when that happens. Have I been gone to long? Can I no longer have influence and bring order? Did I ever?

Each time I move or travel, feel alone or try to make new friends, I'll seek out the local folk jam. Have yet to find a town that didn't have one, now on two continents. It's a great formula, always such a welcoming environment of loving people who never judge, with traditional sensibilities and strong character, always delighted for new blood and the chance to hear a different song for once. These are my people, and wherever in the world I am, I will feel at home. Can I say this about the mudcat these days? Do you think a newcomer feels safe or welcomed? I worry, but have hope.

I was going to go back to college this year. I was all lined up for a masters in Musicology here at Penn State University where I live and work. Following that, off to somewhere else for the Ph.D. Much of what you'll find in this absurdly long post (trolls are too lazy to read posts this long) is what I have chosen instead. As is my way, I'm taking the long way around. I'm going for the honorary Ph.D. that I'll rightly deserve if I can pull this off...

ADS

So here I am, chugging along for years with just a few ads and hardly a complaint, and Google starts sending me these emails saying that their data indicates that I can do much better by allowing image ads and few more prominent positions. I ignore them for no less than a year with skepticism of the claims but certainty of how they'll be received. Well, in early March, I caved and thought I'd put it to the test. And what do you know, it quadruples the revenue. What would you do next?

FLAWS

So the problem with Internet Explorer (especially v8 or 9) is bigger than I had hoped. Bigger on mudcat and bigger on the internet as a whole. A lot, and I mean a lot, of people are complaining, and I I really hope that the sheer volume of noise will cause them to give a little and make things easier for folks like me and you.

I am willing to remove things like Chartbeat and some of the more complicated ads and other doodads which I will do soon, but we're left with something that I cannot fix with the current technology we use. According to IE, and only IE, our forum design allows posters to include scripts in the their posts that can have an effect on your computer when you read it. This is the true nature of the Cross-site scripting (XSS) errors.

Now, as some of you have complained, you know that you cannot embed images and videos, and select other HTML code in your posts. This is because I am blocking that ability to 1) protect against XSS and 2) just generally screwing up the mudcat. But, because I am not doing this blocking in a way that Microsoft can detect and validate, they assume we are vulnerable.

Having spent a week trying to do it their way, it began to resemble another problem we have here for which I have already determined to require major surgery to repair... Membership. Without getting too specific, we need a technical infrastructure to validate identities, enforce accountability and give members control of who can contact them.

UPGRADES

As I've hinted at elsewhere, the future of mudcat is going to provide a lot more benefit to members. Having enjoyed meeting many of you in person after meeting you here, and staying in many of your homes, I have come to appreciate, as I know many of you have also, the trust that is exchanged in that transaction. I intend to do everything that is technically possible to make sure the mudcat has no flaw or function that compromises that. We've had to disable some great features like member pages, profiles and pictures and the member locator over the years because of just a few trolls. I want those features back.

I want to ask more of you, the members of this community, but I cannot do so without doing this first. I want a happier, healthier, kinder more helpful community, but that just isn't possible with trolls hanging around. The good folk get eaten alive.

We also have 15 years worth of data here. Conversations that span the whole history. Some good, some bad, some both all mixed up. There are concepts that can be applied to that, integrated into the community, that can start to organically sort and cross-index and validate all this data. Look up crowdsourcing and folksonomy as examples. The cream rises to the top from a peer driven natural interaction of high volumes of traffic through massive amounts of data. We are the perfect case for the application and benefits of these techniques, and would solve the conundrum of mudcat being both a research tool AND community. And those posts that take our breath away and make us cheer and cry, make our day and save our lives won't be lost in a see of vitriol, banality and foolishness.

Volunteers do as much relational work as they can now, but imagine if all of us were helping. The whole concept takes the opinions of the volunteers, and my opinion for that matter, out of the equation too. Removes their burdens, as well. Instead of the endless debates about whether a post should be deleted or not, the community will be passively voting on the quality, validity and appropriateness of the post as they interact with it. Truly, the technical infrastructure for a community to manage itself, without leadership. We all have one vote.

While I stand by my belief in guests and anonymity, an accountable membership goes a long way towards this idealistic vision. Closed networks simply aren't sustainable on the internet, so our doors will always have to be open to all comers, registered or not.

CONCLUSION

Both the FLAWS and UPGRADES will require more ability, skill, time, knowledge and money than I am able to manage. And ads won't even come close to helping. If we had the best fund raiser in our history, we'd still likely fall short.

The solution, as we have it figured now, is to hire a team of very good people to reprogram the mudcat from scratch with all stability, safety and functionality described above without changing the existing simple look and feel. We're going to have to come at this from a different angle. We need a very serious level of funding and/or a partnership with a larger organization. We're considering all sorts of options including grants, associations or mergers, and academic musicology research.

Is it all possible? I believe that it is.