I wish that locked lists, or some alternate form of list locking, could
save incoming user commands which would alter the list, and process them
after the list has become unlocked.
 
As it is now, I avoid locking lists because I don't want for new subscribers
(who may be wholly new to Listserv and Internet) to become discouraged by
the current standard response which says that their subscription can't be
processed because the list is locked.  Although I'm a sole list-owner who
can usually use NOLOCK, my postmaster recently altered my list's header
without coordinating with me, on the assumption that all list-owners
always LOCK their lists and since mine was unlocked ... well, he'd
changed the notebook disk, and I blindly PUT back the header with the old
disk notation.  New list messages were sent to the old disk, the archive
was re-set to message 1.  All was later rectified -- but it was a *mess*!
I suppose I could lean on my postmaster to always coordinate with his
hundreds of list-owners before making any changes, but that might be
arduous for him.
 
So I'm requesting that there be some kind of locked-but-queued alternative,
so that I and other list-owners won't need to be shy about locking our
lists when we make changes to our headers.  Again, I really don't want to
lose any newbie subscribers who may get discouraged by the "can't handle
it now" message that is currently generated by a locked list.
 
-- Roger Burns    [log in to unmask]