At 05:38 PM 2/3/99 +0000, you wrote:
>Does it really cause any problems if two lists at different hosts have the
>same name? What are the implications? Has it given any of you trouble?
>
>Ian Hall

Some people who are on lists at several sites are in the habit of always
writing to [log in to unmask] rather than remembering where their
lists are.  Since more and more of our lists are confidential, this
doesn't work very well for most of our lists anyway, although if there
is a non-confidential list with the same name elsewhere it is even
worse, because the request ends up going to that other site.  Then the
other site may sign them up to a list there, or if they are trying to
get off the list it will say they aren't on it and refer them to some
list owner -there- for more information.

We have a confidential list that has the same name as a list elsewhere,
except that we spell it differently (by one letter).  We wouldn't have seen
this other list when we checked for conflicts because of the different
spelling, but it may actually be worse than having the same name.  Because
whenever someone tried to sign off our list and spelled the name the -other-
way, the request would go to the wrong place -even if they wrote to our
server-.  We finally made a list here with the other spelling and newlisted
it to ours in an attempt to stop this.

(Interestingly, in our particular case the other list is also confidential
and the other list owner claims it has been all along.  But the site may
be the backbone site our server forwards requests to.  Could this be the
explanation?)

Margaret King ([log in to unmask])
Michigan State University