All right, I have discussed this issue with our marketing folks and we've
decided to make a special promotional offer to help all the people who
have recently been asked to find a new home. Our goal with this offer is
to give people some time in which to get organized and make some sort of
arrangement for future funding. But at the risk of disappointing some,
we're not just going to take over all the lists for free. I've checked
the volume figures and GIT has been delivering an average of 53k messages
a day this month. PSU and Temple are only removing some of their lists so
I don't know how much traffic exactly there would be for their lists, but
I imagine the total to be in the 75-100k/day range, which means peaks of
150-200k during busy days. This kind of volume costs real money. In fact,
it costs very real money because that's more than the capacity of the
equipment we have now; to go beyond that we'd need to buy larger
machines. So if we just took all these lists for free there would be an
immediate cost that we would not otherwise incur until we have a couple
hundred paying lists to contribute to the purchase.
Another thing is that we don't want all the lists. While I don't agree
with everything Dave Gomberg said, he makes a good point about "junk
lists". There are lists out there that exist only because someone thought
it was a good idea many years ago, and the organization hosting the list
never had any particular desire to trim its portfolio of lists. Once in
the street, junk lists are bound to disappear because people are never
going to pay for them, and it is unlikely that a system administrator
will decide to host them for free, simply because reviewing the last
monthly logs will make it abundantly clear that the list isn't useful
other than as a private playground for a small number of enthusiastic
participants :-) If these lists are going to disappear anyway, they might
as well disappear now - especially if they are high-volume lists.
To address both issues, we have decided to charge US$50, payable up
front, for the first 3 months (MD residents add the usual sales tax).
This will offset part of our costs in hosting the list and will eliminate
junk lists through natural selection. It's not a huge amount of money for
the list owner to risk, while being enough for most people to think
carefully before sending a list our way. We want the money up front
because we think our chances of collecting after the fact with no hassle
on lists that ended up being dismantled due to lack of interest are not
very high :-) We will set up the list before we get the money, but we'll
be expecting the check shortly. This is a fixed charge for a fixed period
of time; after the initial 3 months the charges will be as per our
standard schedules, or if you found a free home so be it. The $50 are not
refundable unless we are at fault.
Again, this is a limited time offer. After 3 months we'll review how
successful it was and decide whether to make it a policy for all new
lists or not. The $50 price is for an existing LISTSERV list with up to
500 subscribers, up to 50 postings a day, and up to 10M of disk space for
archives. If you think your list will exceed these numbers during the 3
month period, you will need to settle these things *in advance* with the
sales folks ([log in to unmask]). Otherwise we reserve the right to revert
to the charges on our standard price list when these thresholds are
exceeded. All this because one can technically start a list with 1
subscriber and then add several hundred the next day. There are a number
of pretty large lists looking for a new host and at these rates we just
can't afford to be fooled. If the list is not running on LISTSERV, you
are welcome to apply but we will charge a setup fee of $20 since there
will be some extra work involved in configuring the list.
To avoid misunderstandings, the machines we use to host the lists are not
VM mainframes and thus do not have the database functions or advanced
file server functions. If the database functions are vital to your list,
you will need to find another host. The database functions will be
available on non-VM systems 3Q95, and until then we won't be able to
offer them. No need to scream, we're very unhappy about it too :-)
I hope that this eases the situation somewhat for the list owners who
haven't found a new home yet. I think that to some extent the problem you
are facing is that there is a limited creation rate for free lists (say
1-2/sysadmin/month), and on top of that some people have been signing off
the list, presumably because they saw too many requests for list hosting
lately and not enough technical information. With the current downsizing
trends VM people have very limited time on their hands and you're just
going to have to be patient. In particular I don't think reposting your
plea 3 times a week is going to help much, quite to the contrary in fact.
I think your chances are much higher if you can somehow locate a LISTSERV
maintainer who is interested in the subject matter of your list (I know,
it's not easy, but it works).
Eric
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