On Thu, 4 Mar 2004, Michael Johnson wrote:

> What I want is a self-moderated list [2] to guard against forged e-mail,
> that rejects non-subscriber posts [3], that temporarily holds copies of
> un-approved messages requiring moderation [4], and that sends each
> un-approved message to all moderators without load balancing [5].

"Send= Private,Confirm" with the appropriate use of "Review" will
definitely accomplish [2], [3], and [4].  [5] is dicier.  It has been
my experience that when the setting is "Send= Editor", the Editor= and
Moderator= settings are used to determine who the messages requiring
moderation are sent to.  It has been my experience that when the
setting is "Send= Private", the Editor= and Moderator= settings are
accepted but ignored, and all messages requiring moderation are sent
to the primary listowner for approval.  This was under 1.8d, if it
matters.  At the time, I could find no place in the Listserv
documentation that specified the "documented" behavior for this.  But
just now, I found the following statement in the listowner manual:
"Note that if a list is unmoderated, it is still possible to direct
REVIEW postings to a specific person by adding an "Editor=" or
"Moderator=" keyword to the list header."  That implies that my
experience of what Listserv actually did was not in conformance with
the specifications.

. . . . .

>
> This implies the leap-of-faith combination of
>
>         Send= Private
> with
>         Send= Editor,Hold,Confirm
>
> and then defining who all of the editors and moderators are.  Thus:
>
>         Send= Private,Editor,Hold,Confirm
>         Editor= owner1,owner2,owner3,(LISTNAME)
>         Moderator= ALL,owner1,owner2,owner3,moderator1,moderator2

owner1 will by default receive all the messages requiring moderation.
If owner2 and owner3 are also list subscribers, the access level
specification (LISTNAME) makes their entry redundant and you can take
them out.

>
> Syntactically correct or not, this works for me.
>
> If you can recommend a less verbose method of achieving exactly the same
> behavior, great.  Otherwise I'm happy with the way things are set now.
> For example, can I (in the context of the three-line example above)
> shorten the "Moderator=" line to the following using the "EDITOR" access
> level described in [6]?
>
>         Moderator= ALL,Editor,moderator1,moderator2

(1) In contexts like these, access levels must be enclosed in
parentheses, so it would be coded (Editor), not Editor.

(2) The documentation for the "Moderator=" keyword specifies that the
entries for this keyword must be actual net addresses and not access
levels, so this will not work.  The verbosity is necessary in this
line.

In terms of what is correct, I would recommend that you specify

Send= Private, Confirm
Editor= owner1

and leave the moderator line as it is now.  The "hold" and
"(listname)" parts of it are redundant; they both go inherently with
"Send= Private", so Listserv is accepting and then ignoring them.
The only difference it would possibly make if the primary list owner
starts getting copies of the moderated messages instead of all of the
moderators.  That is not supposed to happen according to the
documentation, but the equivalent did in fact happen to me a few years
ago, so I would certainly be interested if it made that kind of
difference.

On the other hand, if it works the way you want now, I would say it's
not necessarily worth changing.  Listserv has a long history of simply
ignoring without any complaints any parameters that fall within its
syntax rules but are invalid in a particular context (like this one, I
expect).  It will accept "Send= Private, Hold" without complaint even
though "Hold" only makes sense with "Send= Editor". (And BTW, the
manual states: "'Hold' is valid only with 'Editor'.)  I suspect it's
doing the same thing with "Send= Private, Editor", taking "Private"
and then ignoring "Editor".  That's why you think that this
combination is actually working to give you what you want.

Dennis

> --
> Best regards,
> Michael
>