When you look at your friends list on Facebook you can click on a name and see who are your friends in common. When I look at Joe Offer's name, we have 88 mutual friends. Care to hazard a guess where we met? Jeanene Pratt and I share 74 mutual friends. Severn Savage and I share 58 mutual friends. Charlie Ipcar - 58 mutual friends. Deb Cowan, Bruce Baker, Jerry Rasumssen, George Papavgeris . . . you get the idea. Over time we've connected on Facebook as a backup to Mudcat (especially in those times when it is out due to weather or mechanical catastrophe) and a way to "see the pictures."

The other large cluster of mutual friends is from my work at the university, though I was careful there not to friend management, just on general principles. Now that I'm retired, I find it nice to keep up with friends that way.

The Mudcat Facebook page was at one time Troll Central, the old Mudcat troll from about 2009 to 2013 had dozens of fake accounts that inhabited that page and were put up exclusively to harass forum members who also had Facebook accounts (and some who didn't). He harvested photos (before we all knew about how to set the sharing on our accounts to keep him from doing that) and stirred in a mix of political BNP/EDL/etc crap OR a mix of softcore porn and launched these things to make people miserable. It took a lot of work to get those accounts taken down and the dozens of Flickr accounts with his stashes of similar photos removed.

That said, it's remarkable that any old-time Mudcat members want to have anything to do with the Facebook page. It took a lot of moderation and vetting new members (the troll has made numerous attempts to rejoin) to finally make it seem like a safe place again. There were a half-dozen or so Mudcat members working behind the scenes to get rid of that crap, even doing legal work to approach the hosting sites ("My Opera" was particularly pernicious). Mudcat is worth it, but a lot of newcomers don't know that history, and aren't aware of why sometimes the rules on the FB page seem a bit rigid. Facebook would eat Mudcat's lunch in no time at all if we let all of our activity happen there - and Zuckerberg gets the revenue from all of those eyeballs, not Max, who runs this forum and remarkable music database. Plus, what happens on Facebook is usually lost on Facebook within a couple of days, and you have to know how to search for old stuff on Facebook to retrieve a fraction of it.

We get arguers, people who don't want to do it that way, who recite the rules back at us and suggest we need to do this or that - because they want to do what they want to do. Sometimes I'd be perfectly happy if the FB page went completely away - except someone else would create it again. So it's better to wrangle the one that exists and try to keep the wealth of music content and history information over here at Mudcat Central. And a final thought, a lot of old-time Mudcatters simply don't or won't use Facebook (see the OP). They miss a lot if it only happens in the Zuckerberg Zone.

Here's a pretty good example of the two sites working together: The Cruel Sister (post with video and conversation).

/rant off