Greetings,
 
My name is Bob Brewster, and I am a Computing Consultant for Boston College.
I have a couple faculty members here at Boston College who are interested in
setting up a private discussion on LISTSERV.  I have gone through the
documentation from Boston University (LISTSERV@BUACCA) and have come to the
conclusion that the only way to do this was to contact the LISTSERV
administrator at Boston University.  I retrieved the LISTSERV administrator's
name via the HELP command on LISTSERV at that site, and sent that person a
letter asking for help.  The reply was this:
 
    "While BUACCA is currently operating as a listserv backbone, we do this
    only to minimize the amount of mail that gets sent around the regional
    Nearnet network; overall, we encourage the use of software like vnews,
    rn, readnews and downplay the use of listserv. As a result, listserv
    "expertise" is fairly limited, and we definitely don't have the
    personnel to support private listserv discussion groups. (There are a
    few lists that live on BUACCA but they were started years ago, and
    existed before this policy.)"
 
Boston College is currently getting the hardware and software configured for
Usenet News, and it is not yet available to the user community here.  I also
asked this person to either send me some information or point me in the right
direction to finding the information on how users can set up their own private
discussion groups on LISTSERV.  The reply I got was:
 
    "If you've already looked at listserv help files, I don't think there's
    much else I can do for you. My staff is primarily working in Unix (Aix
    and SunOS), and we do very little work in the BITNET networking area.
    I've included here a list of the MEMO files that we received when we
    installed the last release of listserv; I'd be happy to mail any of
    these files to you if you think it would help you, but I wouldn't be
    very good at helping you interpret them."
 
If this is true that there is little support for LISTSERV at Boston
University, should I contact the administrator of another LISTSERV to set up
these discussions?  Any help you have to offer would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks in advance for your efforts!
 
Sincerely,
-  Bob Brewster, VAX Consultant
   Info Processing Support, Gasson Hall 012
   Boston College
   Chestnut Hill MA  02167
 
Email:
   Internet:  [log in to unmask]
   BITnet:    Bob@BCVMS