Rick,

Thanks for the compliment - politeness and articulateness, (what an ugly word) are virtues that I'm more than pleased to be associated with. Comes from being English ;-)

As far as the thought that I'm 'gargoyle' or 'gg' in disguise is concerned - I'm not. I'm Ed.

Thanks to everyone who has replied here. Obviously the idea of spliting the messages is not well favoured. Whilst I don't agree with many of the reasons put forward, on reflection, I'm inclined to agree.

After due consideration, I realise that, if the threads were split, many newcomers might just join the 'BS' thread and the place would hence lose (what I assume to be) the guiding principle of being a place for 'folkies' to talk.

Besides, what am I doing now except contributing to a non music thread...

What I would say, however, is that there needs to be a better guide for new users to understand how things work here.

A prominently placed link on the main page detailing 'help for new users' could well help to dismiss some of the confusion I've certainly felt. Explanations of prefixes could be explained, details of how to track threads or search old threads, information on putting HTML code into messages and so on.

Recently I replied to a message from 'Neil' who wanted some chords for Nic Jones's Drowned Lovers. I supplied these. There was no reply from him. Maybe he just took the chords and left. He may well never have seen them...

All the best

Ed