On Wed, 08 May 2002 at 02:33:10PM -0400, Pete Weiss wrote:
> One alternative not mentioned: use of TOPICS (up to 23).  This requires
> ongoing list-owner and poster vigilence.  Useful for lists that don't
> have a high subscriber churn so that established posters can figure out
> the semantics.

I've used topics on a ~400 member non-technical list for a few years.
Posts without a topic keyword, with a keyword but no colon, topic
drift, etc., are perpetual problems.

I resorted to writing an autonag formail (I run Linux) script that
sends a polite reminder and explanation whenever a message without a
properly formatted keyword is posted. It helps, but it doesn't come
close to solving the problem on my list.

Over-quoting is also a continuing problem, so I wrote another script
that detects more than one copy of the list footer and sends another
message explaining why over-quoting is a bad idea. This catches almost
all of the overwrites because people who trim quotes at all will
usually trim the footer.

The capability to reject messages that have more than one copy of the
footer should be a feature of LISTSERV, IMO.

Regards,

-rex