> Sorry, I disagree.  The emphasis these days seems to be on the currently
> popular "point 'n click" scheme as that is what sells, and if that is not
> compatible with the old procedure which has been used forever, too bad.
> The changes in this regard do not appear, to me, to be in the interest of
> making a better product, but cattering to the current whims of the buying
> public, with web/point 'n click taking precedence, as that is what sells.
>
> As support evidence I give you AFD/FUI, an extremely useful feature.
> It was promised that it would be "ported" very quickly.  We are still
> waiting, because it does not "sell" so LSOFT isn't doing anything about
> it, despite past promises.

Well, we have been running LISTSERV since before it was a commercial
product and we definitely think that a good web interface to LISTSERV
is far more important to us than AFD/FUI support.  The benefit to our
users is much greater.

One thing that would benefit both the email and web interfaces that as
far as I know L-Soft isn't planning is a way to feed LISTSERV
information about the equivalence of email addresses.  We, like many
other sites, have a CCSO/ph directory forwarder (or an equivalent
system) that sends mail addressed to xxx@domain to a preferred email
address [log in to unmask] Those two addresses are equivalent and
sometimes users get subscribed to lists with one and sometimes with the
other, depending on how they got subscribed and how their email client
is configured.  It causes problems with users not being able to
unsubscribe, set options, or search archives because the email address
they are subscribed with is the "wrong" one.  This is not just a
problem with the email interface, but is also a problem with the web
interface because it uses email address/personal password combinations
to verify that the user has authority to do what they are requesting.
To the extent that users do more things such as searching archives
because the web interface is easier to use, it will affect the web
interface more.

So what we would like to have is an exit that would, given an email
address, supply a list of equivalent addresses.  LISTSERV would try the
email address it has and it that's not there, call the exit and try
each of the email addresses returned by the exit.  We would gladly pay
a substantial price in additional overhead to support this, as it would
make LISTSERV a lot more usable for our users.  That's the name of the
game today.  It doesn't matter how powerful a system is if users aren't
able to use it.