>At 11:22 AM 5/4/98 -0400, John Bachman wrote:
>(snip)
>>Do any of you who have experience with TOPICS have any advice about it.
>>Pros, cons, things to watch out for?

I've been using TOPICS on one of my lists for about a year now with
(mainly) very good success. This is an unmoderated list, so I have to trust
my subscribers to use the appropriate topics when they post. Periodically I
post a list of topics and desciptions and instructions on how use them.

What gets me most about using topics is that subscribers often post a
message with *JUST* the topic name and nothing else ... makes it hard to
follow a message thread. And the other thing is that often the TOPIC
changes in the middle of a long message thread and the messages wind up
having nothing to do with the TOPIC being used. But that is no different
from people using the same subject line over and over even when the message
is not related.

You will have to tell your digest subscribers that they are going to get
every single message no matter which topics they want to receive. Digests
and Indexes get everything.

Some users also do not understand that if they post to a topic that they
are not subscribed to that they won't get a copy of their own message back
(when set to repro, which is my default) so they think that the message
hasn't been distributed and they send it over and over and over again
(instead of writing to ask me what's up).

Also, you might want to decide whether to have new subscribers
automatically be subscribed to all topics or only some. On my list I have
the main topics set as default and then minor topics require subscribers to
specifically add them.

Finally, there is a topic ALL: which sends the message to every subscriber
regardless of their topic choices. Unforuntately, on a non-moderated list,
list topic can't be restricted to list owners only and I've had subscribers
send their unsub requests to the topic ALL: in response to an admin posting
I just made.

And that's my take on topics. Hope it helps.
Karen Strauss
[log in to unmask]