I bring up this subject twice every year. Those who already know please excuse
me ... but I'm really pissed.
 
Let  me give  some details  of the  problem for  those not  familiar with  the
concept of forwarded commands:
Lists can be  GLOBAL or not. The  headers of global lists  are exchanged among
backbone servers  and also stored in  the lists-database of the  servers which
have this  feature enabled.  The fact  that a backbone  server knows  of these
lists and  also the placement  makes it possible that  you can subscribe  to a
global list without knowing it's hostnode or the peernode nearest to you.
A backbone server has all the  required information to select the peer nearest
to  you -  and  a non-backbone  server  forards the  request  to it's  nearest
backbone.
 
Clearly for this  feature to work the  lists must be unique, i.e.  either on a
single host or all lists of the same  name must belong to the same peer chain.
If this is not the case the automatic forwarding is not possible. This affects
SUBSCRIBE, SIGNOFF (unsub) and REVIEW commands.
There are more  than 60 lists where  the requirement of uniqueness  is not met
among  them very  popular  lists  like MAIL-L,  NEXT-L,  REXXLIST, SAS-L.  The
culprits  are re-distribution  lists  (non-peered  lists) which  are  - in  my
opinion incorrectly - defined as  global lists. Since often these redist-lists
are intended for "local" use only (e.g.  by means of a Service= keyword) it is
not too  complicated to add  "Confidential= Service"  for example to  make the
list non-global. It would certainly improve service to the community.
As for  e.g. NEXT-L  I'm not  sure if  these are  indeed two  different lists.
Wouldn't make much sense anyway, so - please Maintainers and Listowners, check
out your lists.
 
While we  are at it  - there are  a number of lists  in the global  list which
obviously shouldn't be there (at least  names like TEST, TEST-L and similar or
descriptions in swahili let one suspect that).  As a final word: I found three
global lists named POSTMAST ....
 
Christian