|I've found subject guidelines to be by far the most time-consuming to
|enforce. UGH! I think Topics would be very hard. Have you considered
|giving them up? As for getting people to follow other subject guidelines
|(my favorites are "To Joe"), constant vigilance is needed. But, I have
|found that if I have the energy to attend to it and send out a reminder
|in the "I need your help..." vein, I get good cooperation.

On one list that I co-operate, we do have about a dozen topics.  We have
spent considerable effort reminding posters and new subscribers
(WELCOME).  One thing that we have done is created a new topic called
MISC which pretty much "replaces" the reserved topic OTHER.   New
subscribers have

* DEFAULT-TOPICS= ALL,-OTHER

As usual, posters who do NOT use an appropriate topic, default to OTHER,
and unless a new subscriber has SET themselves to +OTHER, they will not
be bothered by the poster who can't/won't follow the guidelines.

Posters who find that an existing topic does not fit will then explicitly
choose MISC.

/Pete
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