Well, I suppose you could look on it as a battle for turf. The "turf" is the Forum Menu. It's important turf, because it's the main portal to our discussion forum. It has an effect on all of us, visitors and oldtimers alike. If we visit Mudcat and see a variety of topics that interest us, we'll stick around and join the discussion. If there are very few music threads visible, the musicians may not stay long. If there is an overwhelming number of threads on any given topic, people not interested in those topics aren't likely to stay.

So, our Forum Menu should have a balance, an balance that will be inviting to the people we want to invite. My job is to maintain that balance, and to control people who are intent on causing trouble. I try to do it with as little interference as possible, but it's a difficult task. Jeff give me tools to do what I do, and I'm somewhat limited by the limitations of those tools. Thread grouping is a marvelous tool, but it doesn't work as well as we'd like on long lists of related threads. We're working on it. It's nice to be able to move messages and delete redundant threads, if done sparingly - I have to deal with messages one at a time, so that helps encourage me to do it sparingly.

You know, I'm not sure that thread creation is the root of our problem. If this were a social group, the birthday and personal threads wouldn't be out of balance. If this were a British music political action group, the number of PEL threads would certainly be appropriate. If this were a war and peace forum, the variety of Iraq threads would be marvelous.

If I may paraphrase something that Big Mick has said many times, this is NOT a Folk Music Forum - it is a forum for lovers of folk music. Our emphasis is on folk music, but we are open to all topics that are of interest to people who love this music. To keep the folk people here we have to tweak a few things to keep the balance - that's all. this is not some major censorship campaign.

We've talked of cascading menus. The Forum Menu would have general topics, and you'd click on a topic to reveal a page of related subtopics. One major problem with that is that the Forum Menu would always look the same, and it might break our community into subgroups with limited scope - the Iraq subgroup, the conspiracy theorists, the birthday revelers, the PEL activists, and the lyrics geeks. Within a very short time, the subgroups would fall out of communication with each other, and that would be a shame. I think that the eventual solution to our problem will be some system of cascading menus, but it has to be something that keeps our Forum Menu fresh and interesting.

We're open to suggestions. The trouble is, some people seem to think that we are required to follow their suggestions precisely. We welcome suggestions and take them under consideration, but we just can't do everything everybody requests.

Until we come up with a better solution, I'll be doing some mild thread consolidation to keep things in balance. I'd like to ask Mudcatters to help by simply taking a bit more care when you start a thread.

Thanks.

-Joe Offer-