I liked Christopher Conn's solution to reducing the amount of traffic
on his list.  I had a similar problem with activ-l.  Since it wasn't
possible to create a new list for activ-l related discussions, and
since most subscribers only wanted to see the non-discussion articles,
I resorted to the following scheme:
I have users who wish to partake in discussions do a 'SET ACTIV-L FILES'
(The FILES flag isn't otherwise used, since I have "Files= No" in
the list header)
Every day I do a GET ACTIV-L (NOLOCK and have a rexx exec scan the list
for subscriptions with the FILES flag set.  These entries are saved
in another file (ACTIV-L DISC) on my disk.
When I get an article for approval, if it's a discussion article,
instead of forwarding it back to the list, I run a little exec to
generate a distribute mail job to mail it to the discussion group only, and
send an ack to the author.
I discovered that I could keep the original From: line intact if I
included a "Sender: mathrich@umcvmb" in the distmail mail file.
It's worked out pretty well for me.  If anyone wants the execs I use,
let me know.  (they'll only work on cms)
 
Rich