As administrator of listserv.temple.edu, I am looking for a way where students
in certain cources can be automatically subscribed to the appropriate lists
for their cources.

We probably have about 1,000 course related Listserv lists here. Right now,
students are either required to subscribed to the lists for their courses
or the instructors subscribe the students for them. Each list is maintained
by its respective course instructor.

Any instructor who wants to utilize a Listserv list for his or her students
has to request the list via a somewhat manual process, but one that's very
easy to deal with for all parties concerned.

Now, I figure that it would be a good idea if the students can be subscribed
automatically for any list that's created for any course that has a list
associated with it.

In order to implement this service, I thought I would set up a web page
on our Listserver. We run Listserv 1.8d under Unix and Apache as our httpd
server. This web site would allow the instructor to type in his or her
personal list password, the name of the list, and some course identification
information. The web page would call a CGI script just to verify that the
list in question exists. If the list exists, then another script would
generate
the appropriate job file and email it to listserv so that the various
subscriptions can be processed. The data file with the students' names and
email addresses will be sent to me at least once a day and it will be in a
format that's easily parsed by a Perl script. I figure I will let Listserv
actually verify the instructor's password and email address for the request.

What I am wondering is if this idea sounds sensible. How do you Listserv
site managers at other universities handle this service?

Thanks