On Wed, 30 Sep 1998, Winship wrote:
> I don't want to speak for Jim Gerland, but the rules at Buffalo, once you
> have established that there is local interest and have local faculty or
> staff to "sponsor" the list, are pretty loose.  It is more or less assumed
> that the listowner knows what he is doing and will go forth and do good.
> Once the list is set up no questions will be asked unless the listowner
> totally screws up and Jim is flooded with complaints.  The listowner knows
> what he's doing and keeps his list on track for the purpose for which it
> was established, realizing that certain things are proscribed and it is
> the job of the listowner to take care of such things, he is not bothered
> by reference to petty codified rules.

This is the same thing I do here at Temple University. Management here has
shown little interest in formalizing our policies regarding Listserv so I
made up my own being as though I am our Listserv system manager. We
maintain roughly 700 lists at this time and I get requests for new lists
on a near daily basis and our Listservs (we have two) are heavily active.
I insist that all requests for to create lists be e-mailed, not made
verbally as this is my basic test that the prospective list owner knows at
least how to use e-mail. Prospective list owners who do not know how to
use e-mail are politely asked to learn how before they request a list. I
do not recall ever encountering resistence to this policy in the ten years
or so that I have been working with Listserv. My Listserv maintenance
responsibilities also include full management of the computer (a small DEC
Alpha box with Digital Unix and Netscape's Enterprise Server on it) plus
other non-Listserv tasks so I definitely do not spend all my time each day
dealing with Listserv issues. I do have a student worker who is very
bright who helps me maintain Listserv. For example, he's working on
installing qmail to replace sendmail on our Listserv box now.

One of the few things I ask prospective list owners is that any student
who requests a list for a university-related organization has a university
employee be a co-owner of the list. For some reason, I get a lot of
requests for lists by people who know very little about computers. With
that in mind, I have set up a brief Listserv Primer Web site at
http://www.temple.edu/Listserv which explains the basic commands that a
list owner needs in order to maintain and utilize a list. You're welcome
to look at this Web site if you're interested although it needs to be
updated to reflect Listserv 1.8d. All lists which are coded anything but
"Confidential= Yes" and "Subscription= By_Owner" must include
"Subscription= Open,Confirm" to cut down on spoofed subscriptions.  I also
code all non-moderated lists with "Send= Private" to cut down on spamming.
This has worked extremely well for us. The few times I have relented on
the "Send= Private" issue have come back to haunt me so I am very
insistant on that policy. If I see a list which is coded differently, I
change it back and inform the list owner of the change. This rarely
happens though.

Course-related lists are also named based on the course number and the
instructor's name (e.g., CIS55-JONES). These lists are all hidden via
"Confidential= Yes" and to make things easy for our students, I code them
with "Subscription= Open" instead of "Subscription= Open,Confirm".

Each day, a script I wrote also wakes up and e-mails a list of the lists
to management and our Help Desk consultants who are not authorized to use
the "list" command to see "Confidential= Yes" lists. This same report is
placed on a hidden Web site so that my boss and me who prefer not to
receive the report via e-mail can look at it. This way, when a wayward
student stops by the Help Desk to ask for help subscribing to the list,
and the student doesn't know the list's name (which happens extremely
often around here), the consultant on duty can refer to the report to get
the necessary information.

I also provide a huge amount of the support for individual list owners,
which I do almost always via e-mail. Most of the questions I get pertain
to notices of delivery errors so I just send the delivery error back to
the list owner with the relevant part of the error message copied into my
commentary to point out what's wrong. For most other questions, I insist
that the list owner read my Listserv Primer or stop by our Help Desk for
assistance.

Sorry for rambling on. I hope this is what you are looking for. If you
have any further questions along these lines, let me know.