On Thu, 8 Aug 1996 10:30:46 PDT Peter Rauch said:
>It seems to me that some long term commercial value (to L-Soft) can be
>had by providing a mechanism for hiding owner-selected LIST keywords.
 
   As Eric has explained, that exists.  Make the list confidential.
 
>I can imagine that large commercial firms could use LISTSERV for hundreds
>of small, ad hoc committee/working group/team project/board/etc discussion
>lists. I can imagine that for some of these lists, who is involved,
>how they are involved, what they are involved in, when they're involved
>(and dis-involved), is company- and/or project- or committee-sensitive
>information.
 
   No question.  Which is why you'd make those confidential.  We run several
of those on various topics.  If I have, say, a list called WIN95 regarding
local implementation issues on converting a zillion Win3.1 machines to Win95,
I darn well don't want anyone to even KNOW it exists.  I can tell you from
previous experience that if people know it exists they'll ask to join it,
even if it is set up as local, and even if the listname is win95bsu.  They'll
write me message saying "well, we're gonna do win95 here at West Nowhere State
and we wanna learn from your experiences and discussion, and I promise only
to lurk".  Then when I tell them NO they get all pissy and bitchy about it.
 
   So, the answer is to make them confidential.  I'll bet there are way more
confidential lists out there then there are public ones.  I know there are
here.
 
   I continue to support the present system, and from personal experience
can tell you that the selective mechanism is a BAD THING for lists that
are strictly for internal purposes.
 
   For editors who want to be anonymous, well, I have no sympathy.  If they
can't take any potential heat, then do without them.  It sounds to me like
a lot of people do what I thought only librarians did: manage by exception.
Lots of librarians are REALLY good at thinking up worst possible case things
and then planning the whole system around it.  Yes, engineers try to do this
for 747s and space shuttles, but most real life systems don't need the
multiple levels of redundancy.  LISTSERV also doesn't need this.
 
Whether you call this "creeping featurism" or "creeping elegance" the next
thing you know you have a Netscape that takes 10mb compressed to download or
software like WordPerfect or Win95 that is impractical to install from
floppy.
 
cheers
 
cyclops
 
(oh, p.s. to a previous poster....he does own a list in the way the term is
normally used....if you do the dirty work of deletes, bounces, etc, you OWN it
[or it owns you]....this doesn't mean you own the hardware or software, do
any moderation, etc. )
  Dan Lester, Network Information Coordinator
  Albertsons Library, Boise State University, Boise, Idaho 83725 USA
  [log in to unmask]             http://cyclops.idbsu.edu/
  How can one fool make another wise?  Kansas, "No One Together," 1979