A lot of people have been reporting "LISTSERV loops" when processing a
pile of X-DEL jobs from Albany. Well, these are no loops, it just takes
several hours for the jobs to run on small machines, and this is why
netwide DELETE has been removed from 1.8a, as announced in April when
1.7f was released. The problem is not in making the code more efficient,
which can always be done, but in the simple fact that the design of
netwide DELETE (sending a list of all your expired userids to all the
LISTSERVs) doesn't scale up. With maybe 50 sites using that service, we
have barely managed to keep the costs to a reasonable level. If just half
of BITNET were using it, every LISTSERV site would have 1-10 million
userids to look up in all lists at the end of each semester, of which
maybe a dozen would be found. This design was used because nothing else
was available at the time; we could either do it this way, or not do it.
Nowadays you don't need to use netwide DELETE at all if you run LMail, MX
or PMDF (I realize most Internet hosts run things like sendmail or some
kind of PC mail system, but in practice these sites never did use netwide
DELETE anyway).
A couple people also expressed their astonishment at the fact that the
quality of LISTSERV support has degraded now that LISTSERV has become a
product, when one would logically expect the opposite to happen. Well the
reason I am not answering questions on the list is that none of the major
networks has licensed customer support from L-Soft so far. I would like
to remind EARN users that the EARN/L-Soft license explicitly excludes
customer support, that EARN is providing this service to its users
through the EARN office, and that this is part of the price calculation.
L-Soft does *not* think that customer support is not worthy of its
attention, in fact it is in L-Soft's interest to provide this service
because it brings revenue and ensures L-Soft's software is used to its
full potential. However we cannot force people to buy this service, and
if we provide it for free nobody will ever buy it (and it costs a lot of
money too - the questions you see on the mailing lists only represent
about a third of the requests; I have a lot more time for programming now
that I don't answer them any longer). Similarly, if the 3 networks which
are now considering a global license get the impression that free
customer assistance is available from the mailing lists anyway, they are
unlikely to get category II licenses and their members will not have
access to between-release fixes unless they pay for this service
themselves, which many would not do until they are hit by a problem and
some VP or other is standing behind them screaming loudly :-)
Eric
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