<be afraid, be very very afraid -- I'm going to try to respond>

At 14:28 04/22/2002 Monday, Lloyd Anderson wrote:
 >Some of the problems which must face all list owners
 >are kooks and others who want a megaphone and who will not stop,
 >private mail which does not belong on the list, and general noise.
 >We also must support hard-working list owners and moderators,
 >some of whom are comfortable moderating everything,
 >some a little, and some none at all.

Depending upon the degree of harassment and your tolerance for (psychic)
pain, various scenarioes will help:

Assuming your list is SEND=PRIVATE SUBSCRIPTION= OPEN,CONFIRM, set
subscriber to either REVIEW or NOPOST or add user (exact address or
wild-card) to list definition keyword "* FILTER= ALSO,rfc822_addr"  You
might need to place your list is full-moderation with a list of rotating
moderators.

Also SIZELIM= and DAILY-THRESHOLD= (esp the second operand) may help

 >One of the most productive solutions is the recognition that
 >in these situations we have multiple audiences,
 >not all of whom want to be in the same conversations with each other.

Just like just about any discussion list.  Thus some conversations will
be of interest to just about no one and some to everyone.

 >1.  The goal of this request is to minimize unwanted replies
 >to more than the sender intended.  By setting defaults so that
 >predictable common errors will have the minimum consequences,
 >ones which can be easily remedied if they were not right,
 >rather than the maximum consequences which cannot be remedied.

I have many of my lists set to "* REPLY-TO= SENDER,RESPECT"

Not fool-proof but it helps.  Not all of your clients' mail systems are
conformant when they do the reply.

 >A private message sent to a large email list cannot be remedied,
 >and is a worse error, than a message intended for an email list
 >which was sent only to an individual.  The second is easily remedied,
 >but is often preferable to the community as a whole.
 >Because of this asymmetry, message senders should have to take an
 >intentional action to send to a large list rather than to just one recipient,
 >since the large mailing is a burden on more people.  And above all,
 >those receiving messages should have an easy CHOICE whether
 >to reply only to the originator or to an entire email list.  Currently
 >they often do not.

The most dangerous key on your keyboard -- SEND.



 >They either reply to the email list (the effect of reply-to-sender),
 >or to the email list and also any other individuals or lists which
 >were listed as addressees of the same message.

Subscribers might prefer to use the INDEX (with or w/o URLs to full text)
OR simply use the WEB interface (SEARCH SINCE YESTERDAY).

 >     a)  Currently messages whose subject lines are not marked
 >for an existing topic go by default into OT(her).  Could it be
 >made possible for these to be sent to the moderator instead?

One of my lists that uses about 12 of the 23 definable (not 10) topics
has a definition setup of:

* TOPICS= top1,top2,top3,MISC
* DEFAULT-TOPICS= ALL,-OTHER

Thus any mistopiced or misspelled topic, goes to OTHER; but only
MAIL-mode subscribers who have explicitly set themselves to ALL or added
(+) OTHER will be burdened by the poster who can't figure out topics.

Side comment: the use of topics by most list subscribers is not
fool-proof and mistakes often happen

 >Can the Validation or other facility do this?

No.

 >If not, as it stands, we can achieve something similar
 >by using one additional Topic cateogory, call it UNCL(assified) for now,
 >have no subscribers receive the OT(her) topic area except the moderator,
 >and then the moderator can send messages into the appropriate topic
 >area if they are not already so marked. The moderator will not have
 >to look at messages which are properly marked.

Yes, see above.

 >    b)  Can the Validation or other facility respond to an incoming
 >message not marked for topic by returning the message to the sender,
 >(preferably not with any quotes added), prefaced or accompanied
 >by a reminder message that they need to specify an existing topic,
 >and a list of the topic abbreviations?

No

 >    c)  Can the Validation or other facility co-ordinate topic areas
 >with subscribers, permitting certain subscribers to post only
 >to certain topic areas?

Not unless some sort of user EXIT= can be coded

 >
 >***
 >
 >3.  Can the number of possible Topic areas be increased beyond 10?
 >(OT(her) and ALL are currently included in those 10)

Yes -- 23.


 >***
 >
 >4.  Can it be made possible to have an abbreviation other than
 >the list name appear at the head of each subject line, when setting
 >SUBJecthdr ?

Yes, there is a list definition keyword that can specify an explicit value.

 >5.  Can it be made possible to filter subject lines so that if there
 >is one "Re:" or one [SUBJecthdr], a second or third one cannot
 >be introduced through successive replies?  Such a sequence
 >leads to a subject line with no content information at all visible
 >in a limited width.  [This last request may not be relevant to
 >ListServ, it may be relevant to some other email list management
 >programs.]


No.

Final Comment:

Though it may be that the current LISTSERV can help with some of your
difficulties, it is most likely that (a) full-time moderators are
required in order to maintain the quality of list distributions that you
desire.

</be afraid, be very very afraid -- I'm going to try to respond>

Pete Weiss @ Penn State