I support the requests made by several subscribers to LSTOWN-L for a
facility which would give list owners more control of which parameter
settings (i.e. list keywords) are visible in response to a REVIEW
command. I particularly liked the suggestions by Shahrukh Merchant
<[log in to unmask]> (in his messages of Wed, 7 Aug 1996 19:38:00 EDT
and Fri, 9 Aug 1996 19:15:00 EDT) about having "flags" on individual
lines of the list header to indicate whether that particular line should
be hidden. Unfortunately, such flags don't feel very LISTSERVish,
at least to me.
 
Therefore, I'd like to restate the goal and suggest another possible way
in which the list owner could control the visibility of list header
lines.
 
Proposed Goal: There should be a mechanism by which a list owner can
control which list header lines are visible via a REVIEW command. This
only should affect the header lines. It would affect the header lines
when the list was REVIEWed by anyone. It would not have any effect
when someone with sufficient access did a GET of the list header.
 
Proposed Control Mechanism: Introduce a new keyword (e.g "Hide="). The
keyword might take two values: "On" and "Off". A line reading
* Hide= On
would mark the beginning of a block that was to be hidden. A line reading
* Hide= Off
would mark the end of a block that was to be hidden. (You can probably
come up with better words than "Hide", "On", and "Off" - for example
perhaps "Start" and "End" might be better choices than "On" and "Off".
Regardless of the actually words, I hope you understand the idea that
I have in mind.)
 
I think that it is relatively unimportant whether none, one, or both of
Hide= keywords are themselves hidden, although if it didn't cause any
problems, I'd have a mild preference that they both be hidden.
 
About the only difference between this proposal and Shahrukh's proposal
it that this proposal feels more consistent with other LISTSERV syntax.
 
/David M. Rosenberg          [log in to unmask]          1-617-253-8054