At 07:01 AM 10/28/2004, Clark Pickett wrote:

>I believe that Charles Oriez's answers to Susanne Lamido's questions are
>making
>a relatively simple process more difficult than it needs to be.  It appears to
>me that what Susanne is trying to achieve is exactly what we have with a
>number
>of our EEAC lists.  We have 21 active lists.  All of our lists are Private.
>Eight of our lists require completion of a subscription questionnaire and
>approval by the listowners before the subscription is established.  For
>each of
>these lists, we have placed the questionnaire as the text in the ADDREQ1
>template.  The first 3 lines of each template contain the following:

We have a 700,000 person organization and 900 lists.  we originally used
but replaced the manual process that Clark suggests because the
administrative overhead of verifying the memberships got to be expensive in
staff time and other resources.  Someone had to review the questionnaire
(even if all it had was name, address, membership number), verify the
membership against the database, and issue the add command, or send a note
back to the person saying that we couldn't find their membership or it had
expired.  We were getting multiple dozens of those requests a day when we
had a manual system, and our staff member was using roughly 30% of her time
dealing with them.  That exceeded the cost we were willing to absorb.

Initial implementation of my solution is more difficult, but day to day
management of an automated system, because it requires no human
intervention, has been  simpler.  I joined one of our member only lists at
2 AM this morning, and was making posts by 2:15.  With a human intervention
required, even if the staffer reacted immediately upon reaching her office
this morning and I was the only member asking to subscribe last night, it
would be another 2 hours right now before I would be able to make posts to
that list.

It is entirely possible and even likely that Clark's proposal will serve
Susan's needs. However, she didn't indicate though whether we were talking
about a 500 member organization with 20 lists that gets one join request a
week, or the NRA.  An organization the size of the NRA with millions of
members would almost certainly have to duplicate our procedure for the same
reasons that we implemented it, and would be large enough to find our
solution cost effective.



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