>It seems to me... not that that means much.. a useful function might be the
>ability to control a subscribers ability to modify their settings.
>
>If I could set them nomail/digest/index etc.. and they could not change
>it...
>
>How many times have you encountered subscribers with limited mailboxes...
>frequently not checking or going out of town.. set them nomail.. they come
>back.. alter back to mail... catch 22..
>
>Laziness on the part of posters would appear to me to be one of the most
>challenging of duties a list owner addresses..
>
>Quoting entire posts in response rather than editing for quality
>discussion.. forwarding attachments rather than cutting and pasting germain
>information.. well you all know...
[. . .]

I'm presumably missing something, but I don't see how the ability to
control a subscriber's ability to modify their settings would help
solve any of the problems above.

In terms of people who chronically bounce messages, if it's really
irksome a listowner could add them to '* Filter=' or the LISTSERV
maintainer could SERVE them OUT or add them to TRAPIN and/or TRAPOUT.
This will prevent them from resubscribing and thus from receiving
mailing list mail, which is about what a permanent NOMAIL setting
will do.

As far as excessive quoting (which I hope I'm not guilty of here) and
attachments, there are various tools already at your disposal,
including but not limited to '* Sizelim=' and setting problem users
to REVIEW or NOPOST (settings which the user cannot generally alter
without the help of the listowner).

I guess my point is that new tools are being added to LISTSERV (see
all the changes from 1.8c to 1.8d, for instance) and I think that's
good, but I don't (yet) see what the value of allowing a listowner to
control a subscriber's ability to modify his or her settings would be.

-jwgh