I've been moderator of the Theory Net bulletin board for over a year now,
and have had the list managed by LISTSERV (at NDSUVM1) for about 6 months.
Up until recently, the list was moderated, because that was the policy that
I inherited from the previous moderator.  In January I was out of town on
business for 4 weeks, and when I returned, there were a lot of contributions,
a number of them already out of date (announcing seminars, etc.).
I decided (in consultation with others) to make the list an automatic
redistribution list so that things would get posted in a timely manner
(this really didn't appreciably cut down on my effort, since I never had
had to edit things -- except to introduce ocassional clarifications.).
However, something all too familiar to the readers of this list happened:
the list started to get a fair number of adminstrative requests and
private replies that weren't meant for the whole list.  I've converted back,
but got to thinking about this whole problem.  Consider the following
suggestion:
  There should be a type of list I would call "semi-moderated".  If the
mail header sent to the list contained a line like (names could be changed)
X-listKey: this is the key
which matched a list key, then the mail would automatically go to the list,
otherwise it would be sent to the editor.  The idea behind this, would be
that a lot of automatic mail generated wouldn't add the above header line.
Participants in the list would be informed of the effect of this, so that
if they knew that the mail was timely, they could add the header line.
Now I realize that some people might just fiddle with their mail program
to always add the header line when sending to such a conference, but I think
that that wouldn't happen very often.  What do the readers of this list
think?
                     Victor Miller -- IBM, Research