Hello:

I ocassionally receive  complaints from subscribers to  individual lists here
that  their  subscription  options   are  lost.  For  example,  subscriptions
defaulting  back  to "mail"  for  people  who  opted  for "nomail".  This  is
sometimes the result of an error on the subscriber's part or a mistake by the
list's owner. With nearly 500 lists  being hosted here, and many more coming,
managing them all from a postmaster  point-of-view is becoming quite a chore.
Fortunately, most  of the  lists' owners  here take  care of  the lot  of the
maintenance  for their  own  lists,  but dealing  with  all  the problems  my
individual list  owner encounters is  getting to be a  full time job  for me.

One thing that would really help me out is I could get an audit trail for the
activities on  each list.  What I have  in mind is  receiving a  daily report
that describes  all the adds, deletes,  and puts (including who  did them and
when they were done) that occurs that day.

This report would no doubt consume a lot  of disk space. I also know that the
logs contain  all this information, but  reading though the logs  for several
days worth of activity for a particular  list to track down a problem is very
time-consuming. Is there  anyone else in this same situation?  What do you do
in order  to maintain your  sanity and manage  your many list's  smoothly? If
there's anyone that  has written a program that provides  this kind of report
and you're willing to  share it with me, please let me know.  I will write my
own  monitoring program  if  I have  to,  I would  definitely  like to  avoid
reinventing the wheel if I can.

Stan Horwitz
Listserv Postmaster
Temple University
Acknowledge to: OASIS@TEMPLEVM (or VM.TEMPLE.EDU)