Well, this thread's revived after well over 3 years and it seems that people *still* don't get what was being said or asked for in the original discussion

we keep coming back to this idea of "bells, whistles and glitzy stuff" whereas from what I could see previously absolutely no-one has asked for those...just suggested that the format is clunky. So, to repeat: yes, it's easy to link to another web page or youtube performance by making a "blue clicky" for example, but every other forum I use just recognises the link string as a URL and auto-creates the link, without having to open a new window, cut and paste strings etc.

It's *this* level of clunkiness that I said 3 years ago was putting off younger people, not the lack of avatars, "like" buttons or similar bells and whistles. But people are still trotting out these "straw men".

Making the site a bit more streamlined isn't "pandering to the kids" but building for the future of the site.

A remark above dismisses the idea of youngsters liking folk...but I bet most of the users here were into folk back in the 60s when they were in their teens and 20s, and there are large numbers of youngsters out there involved in folk now. As one band I put in in Tunbridge Wells a couple of years back said, on seeing their young audience getting up and dancing: "this makes a change: usually most members of our audience are older than our combined ages, and they never dance". But I'd actually taken the trouble to market the gig at the places where youngsters hang out, rather than just the local folk clubs and sessions.

CS (who is a rare younger member) summed it up back in April 2010: Rob, I honestly don't know how many of the members here would like to attract a lot of younger members. There is definitely a seeming objection to anything being made less counterintuitive (and that's the main thing younger internet users expect - efficient technology which is neatly organised and simple to navigate in order to access exactly the information you want) especially when you consider the presumptions about what young people like or want to find on an internet site such-as "glitz", "bling", "fancy stuff" and so-on.

I had to copy and paste from his post then use HTML tags to do that...the current and coming generations who've grown up on line would just expect to be able to highlight what they wanted to quote and have it appear as an obvious quote! Having that facility, auto URL etc would NOT require people to "learn new stuff" to use the site, it would just reduce the number of clicks and actions needed to produce a result. I can't for the life of me see why people are objecting to such streamlining!