At 11:22 AM 5/4/98 -0400, John Bachman wrote:
(snip)
>Do any of you who have experience with TOPICS have any advice about it.
>Pros, cons, things to watch out for?

TOPICS works exactly as advertised. Education of, and follow through with, subscribers will decide if your "topics" list works well. Non-use of topics on messages by senders, and readers not "SET"ing topics for themselves will reduce the usefulness of the feature for all.

One of our list owners set up their list with topics and disallowed (by rule) anyone from selecting the "OTHER" topic. In the LIST file, DEFAULT-TOPICS= was set to the full list of "real" topics. Periodically they would send:

  SET listname topics= -other for *@*

This way, messages sent without a correct topic are not delivered (except to those set to DIGest at day's end).

Ed Paynter
[log in to unmask]