On Tue, 18 Jul 1995, Winship wrote:
> ... The part of LISTSERV that runs your
> list, over which you have control, and the part of LISTSERV which runs
> AFD/FUI are totally separate. The only connection is what you put in
> your filelist. This means that all you can do for your subscribers is to
> check to see if they have AFD/FUI subs by getting the entire list of
> subscribers.
So what you are saying is that I can setup and manage a list, and I can
setup and manage a filelist, and I can setup the actual files associated
with my list, but as owner I cannot 'manage' AFD subscriptions in the
sense of doing commands for them as I might for the list subscribers.
It seems inconsistent to be able to do it for the list itself but not
the AFD subscriptions. And you are saying the reason is 'historical' - the
code for each is in different parts of listserv, so the AFD code has been
just left as is? No one has had the time to fix it, perhaps? Or is it
intentional for some technical reason?
It is unfortunate, because AFD offers so much.
Part of my (strong) interest here is the perception I have that the idea of
'subscribing' to something is somehow generic. Subscribing to a *list*
used to be the only thing I thought one could subscribe to. But if you
can subscribe to a file, then you can subscribe to *anything* (online, that
is!). Because ultimately, files are all that a system is.
So I should be able to subscribe to a web page, for example! Lets say
the webmaster had a clickable item on the web page called 'Whats New!'.
A lot of pages have that. If the 'Whats New!' text were all in 1 file,
then you could setup a filelist definition of that file, and people could
then use AFD to subscribe to that file; in effect, getting an email
notification of whenever the web site had changes. All it takes is a
conscientious webmaster to update that one key 'Whats New!' file. I can
think of a number of sites that I would like that for; you don't have to
cruise around to see whats new on your favorite sites, which can get
boring when there is nothing new... you don't cruise until you get the
email that there is something new there. Cool!
What do you all think of that?
If you can subscribe to a web page... how about an ftp site? Lets say
you are interested in a certain site, and that site has in INDEX file
(which many do...); if that INDEX file were a part of a filelist for a
listserv at that site, then you could do an AFD subscription to the INDEX
file. Therefore in effect you receive via email whenever there is an
addition to the site. A 'Whats New!' file would be more useful than a
full index... if it is a large index then the ftp site maintainer ought
to do a 'Whats New!' file. But in effect... you are subscribing to
the ftp site.
You could also subscribe to a gopher site, or say the binaries archive for
a Winsock provider to know whats new... it would be cool if the
site 'rtfm.mit.edu' that has all the newsgroup FAQs had a listserv
filelist for all the FAQs there, so that any one of them could be
AFD-subscribable. You don't have to bother with reading a newsgroup
ever, or a big list, if all you want are the FAQ updates.
So listserv is in effect a bit of an information management system
for the net.
Conceptually, we are subscribing to online objects and it makes sense to
me to have them each managed the same way. I have a set of tools to
manage my list and help its subscribers; I ought to be able to use the
same tools, or at least conceptually analagous tools, to manage the other
subscrptions that I am responsible for.
Kevin
SIGNATURE Kevin J. Sinclair, [log in to unmask], USA Pacific Time Zone
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