> Is there some practical way of cleaning up old lists besides just going
> through each list. We probably have around 900 lists, some of which have
> not been used in years and/or the owners have long since left the
> University. Thanks for any input.

If the lists have changelogs enabled, it's pretty easy -- just script a
search for the last POST entry in the list changelogs, read the timestamp,
and you know exactly when the list was last used.  (I never create a new
list without a changelog; you probably shouldn't, either, unless you've
got serious storage constraints.)  This is even easier if you're using the
DBMS changelog feature -- just run a SQL query to spit out all lists with
no POST entry within the last (x) days.

If you aren't using changelogs on your lists but keep list archives, then
you can look at the notebook archive directories, and find the last
notebook log file.  The notebooks all have timestamps in the filename, so
it's again easy to script a search to tell you when the last notebook
archive file was created for each list.

If you aren't using changelogs or notebook archives, then things get more
difficult.  You can parse all of the old LISTSERV logs if you have them,
but that's potentially a pretty massive text search, if you even have the
data available.  Most sites don't keep a year's worth of log files hanging
around on disk.  This is exactly the sort of problem that changelogs were
intended to solve.  If you haven't been using them so far, now would be a
fine time to start.  Even just enabling the SYSTEM_CHANGELOG would give
you information about list postings.  The list-level changelogs will give
you other subscriber stats, too:

http://www.lsoft.com/manuals/15.5/listkeyw.html#kChangeLog

http://www.lsoft.com/manuals/15.5/sitevars.html#cChangelogdbms

http://www.lsoft.com/manuals/15.5/sitevars.html#cSystemChangelog

Hope this helps.

--
Liam Kelly
Senior Consulting Analyst
L-Soft international
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