On  Fri, 26  Sep 1997  01:51:48 -0400  Vince Sabio  <[log in to unmask]>
said:

>1. On  my LISTSERV list,  I have not run  any probes. They  were largely
>panned by the audience (which is lucky to be smart enough to *subscribe*
>to  the damned  list, much  less  figure out  a probe  message which  is
>written in  terms simple enough for  a fifth grader to  understand) back
>when we were on a different LISTSERV, so I did not implement them on the
>new server.

I have yet to run into a  significant body of users who cannot understand
"This  message  is   a  test,  please  discard  it  and   sorry  for  the
inconvenience" :-), but  (with 1.8d) you can use passive  probing in that
case. This turns a small,  controlled number of postings into transparent
probes which look exactly like a normal posting.

>the  users  *appear*  to  be  very quickly  growing  accustomed  to  the
>interface.

My point  was that there is  no particular reason for  an average mailing
list user to  have used the web management interface  and remembered that
it is there if he should change jobs  a year later and need to change his
address. Most users  subscribe, may turn on DIGEST or  whatever, and then
they're set  and happy. They forget  how to send commands  to the server,
how to  sign off,  don't save the  welcome message, etc.  All they  do is
read, post  and reply. This is  why people set up  monthly admin messages
(that double as a probe) and bottom banners with signoff instructions, or
at least a pointer to them. It's nice  to have a web interface so you can
just give people a URL instead of a FAQ when they ask you to do something
for them, but they are still going to ask.

>However, the risk  of taking out the entire server  is problematic to me
>-- as I'm sure it is to my server administrators.

I agree, but most exits are maybe 10-20 lines of code and it doesn't take
long to verify that  they do look for string such and  such and send this
or that mail message to the originator  if found, after doing a lookup in
a file  with addresses of registered  users. The exit can  only take down
the server if it does terrible things like delete all files on the system
(note that  you don't  normally run  as root). If  the exit  program just
crashes, the server  goes on. You can  also test the exit  outside of the
server.

  Eric