On Thu, 12 Oct 2000, Tom Kozma wrote:

> I am curious if all of you who are LISTSERV administrators actually
> create all the new lists for your site. I am the List Admin for our
> site, and so far I have always been the one to create new lists. But
> there is some sentiment here that this is a low-level task that could
> be relegated to a clerical position or, possibly, automated. So I'd
> just like to get some feedback on how this is handled at other
> LISTSERV sites, and the pros and cons of letting someone other than
> the List Admin create new lists. Thanks.

I used to create all the lists here manually. This got to be a very tedius
task, especially at the start of each semester where I would spend one
week doing nothing but create lists. I agree that it is a low level task.
Your time can probably be spent doing other things.

About a year ago, and colleague and I setup an HTML form that's tied to a
Perl CGI script that accepted list creation requests and processed them
every fifteen minutes. This worked out well, but it needed improvement.
About two months ago, I replaced that system with a new one. This system
allows the members of our Help Desk to immediately create lists for those
who request them. Each time a list is created, I am notified and the event
is logged. Our first version just created a generic list.  The new version
allows anyone on our Help Desk to create customized lists via a detailed
HTML form. Each list is created immediately upon hitting the submit key
and the most recent change causes every new list to include our general
help email address as a quiet owner. This makes it much easier for Help
Desk people to deal with the problems that individual list owners may
have.

I still have a bit of work to do because the html form does almost no
error checking. The CGI script checks for naming conflicts, but that's the
only error checking done.

I also set up some other HTML/CGI forms for our Help Desk staff to have
some Listserv management tools. In fact, the most recent Listserv project
I did was create another HTML form where a consultant can enter his or her
email address, the name of a list, and the list will be immediately
deleted. The actual list and its archived files (sans the *.ind* files)
are put into a gzipped tarball file and stored in a directory. Each list
deletion also results in me being notified and logged.

Tied in with this is another script which generates a report with the name
of each deleted list and the date each was deleted. A Help Desk consultant
can click on a checkbox next to any deleted list and undelete it by
pressing the submit button. Of course, the use of this is also
logged.

Another HTML form I set up generates a real time report of all the lists
on our server, who owns them, and the number of subscriptions on each
list. My next project for Listserv is to make a searchable report.

All of these HTML forms are on our Listserv box running under Apache. They
are also restricted to a set of specific IP numbers in order to achieve a
resonable level of security.

At the request of management, I also set up a Perl script (not CGI) that
runs once a day at 23:50. This script generates a report that identifies
the number of existing lists that day, the number of new lists, deleted
lists, reopened list, and the number of requests by instructors to do
automatic subscriptions to their course lists. At the end of each month, a
similar script is run which provides the same report, but for the entire
month. The output of both reports is automatically emailed to various
people who have a need for that information. As we move toward the end of
our fiscal year, I will write a script to generate a report that covers
the entire year, but that's not for several months.

I also want to add some other features, mainly to allow the Help Desk to
rename lists. I also want to set up another form where individual list
owners can delete notebooks and also purge all the subscription entries
from a list.

As a result of these various HTML forms and scripts, I my sanity is
preserved, the Help Desk staff here are also happy, and my managers
receive their daily reports. The time I spend managing our Listserv's
routine operations has dropped almost to nil. I also know that the built
in Listserv web GUI provides a way to create lists, but I would have to
make our Help Desk personnel postmaster to accomplish that and that's an
option my management will not support.