Ross,
 
  What you  ask for is  in contradiction with  the very purpose  of DISTRIBUTE.
First, DISTRIBUTE works on just ANY list of people. It was designed to take off
the burden of having to create  distribution lists for everything. If you force
people  to use  DISTRIBUTE  only  on lists,  you  go  against that  philosophy.
 
  Second, even assuming DISTRIBUTE is  restricted to distribution to a pre-defi
ned  list over  which you  have  control, you  are still  using other  people's
servers. Let's say you're distributing something  to LSTSRV-L. You MAY be using
the xEARN  server. Maybe xEARN doesn't  want to allow distribution  to LSTSRV-L
because they think it is just garbage and they don't want to be involved in it.
So you're back  to step one: you've restricted DISTRIBUTE  to lists, and you've
restricted the  list of  servers who are  involved to the  list of  servers who
run the list.  That is, you've completely removed the  DISTRIBUTE command which
is now  strictly identical to  SF fileid TO listid.  Note that you  can exclude
yourself  from participating  in DISTRIBUTE  by setting  your :version.  tag to
0.0 in your entry.  But this applies to  any and all DISTRIBUTE  jobs, and your
server would still  accept DISTRIBUTE jobs sent from your  node for example and
would forward them to the other servers normally.
 
  Granted, you're responsible for the network/CPU use of LISTSERV. That's why I
asked the list's opinion about such a significant distribution as ARPA digests.
I perfectly understand  your point about people who want  to use your resources
but are  not willing  to cooperate  by installing a  LISTSERV, and  my personal
reaction would be:  NO WAY UNLESS YOU  MAKE THE FIRST STEP. I  find it abnormal
that hub US  nodes are not doing  anything to help dimishing  network load (see
PSUVM which doesn't  have a MAILER). I  find it even more  irritating that they
dare ask us  to lend our resources  while still refusing to do  anything. But I
would like  to help  the network  so I try  to cooperate  with them.  Note that
'they' refer to the decision-makers and  political types, of course the techies
understand what the problem is but they can't make any decision...
 
  Similarly I would find it impolite for someone to use DISTRIBUTE and have its
server removed  from the list of  the LISTSERVs who participate  in DISTRIBUTE.
Meme punition, meme  motif as we say  here. There is of course  no problem with
people who don't want to support DISTRIBUTE on their server but do not make any
use of it either -- this is a very acceptable behaviour.
 
  Eric