Mudcat's really just a crowded bar with lots of people having different conversations. The threads change and people drop in and out of the room and in and out of the conversations. The names of the threads change, but the same set of topics crop up. One of them being idle banter, which should not be disparaged or discouraged, and nor should civilised, if at times heated, polemical discussion. So long as they don't get in the way of the music and the hunt for songs and so forth, which is why we came to this bar anyway.

So you join the people who are talking about what you wnat to talk about, and it's no skin off your nose if other people are talking about something else across the room. Or even if what seems to you extraneous posts get thrown into your conversation.

The day after a big match there are probably going to be a lot of people arguing about it, especially when the decision is still in doubt and theres's a replay, but so what. The structure of the Mudcat is such that even if there are a whole mass of extra threads, everything stays in place for the same length of time. If you use the find facility and "trace" and so forth, it's easy enough to keep up with the topics you want to keep up with and ignore the ones you don't..

I very rarely start threads myself - maybe that makes me a bit parasitic. But then I don't find I start conversations much either in the face to face world, I tend to join in them.