Hi;

I just finished a project of great similarity to yours.

Our University has approximatly 12,000 students and has a few hundred
courses offered through out the year in various semesters.

Last year the Universities administration group came to us and asked us if
we could build lists for each subject offered. Currently there are over 600
subjects which have respective listserv lists. We differ as we build lists
for each subject.

What I was looking for was a system which could take care of everything
automatically, so I don't have to do any work :)

The result is a largish perl script which uses the perl DBI modules to
connect to the Universites central student database. What the script does,
is try to work out what subjects are (currently) on offer. If the subject is new it
builds the list, else if it has expried it removes it.

Then for each subject we extract the students and compare it to who is
currently subscribed. To do this I have hacked the listview tool. Once all
this is done we end up with a list of people who need to be subscribed or
removed from the list (the subject). This is sent as a job to listserv.

The datastructures commonly used in this tool were hashes filled with
annoymous references. Further more to ensure I don't get much mail from
bounces etc (because I own the lists - lucky I have filters), each email
address (which is really their username) is checked using getpwnam(). The
script runs via cron as a non privledged user and seems to be working well.

It works pretty well, and reasonably fast. We run the script nightly at
around 3am or so, to maintain the lists. The reason why we run it daily is
so we can handle the fact that students will vary their enrolment frequently.

As for courses, yes we have this too and we handle it in a similar way. Our
experience is it is best to have the process automated.

I have attached some sample output for you.

                Instance Id 13517/ mate303 Spring 20-JUL-00:
                Subscribing/ Desubscribing members to 13517/ mate303
                        QUIET ADD smp_mate303_13517 PW=**** [log in to unmask] Bernard Vivian Roach


                Working on 15562...
                Instance Id 15562/ edgh940 Spring 20-JUL-00:
                Subscribing/ Desubscribing members to 15562/ edgh940
                        No one to subscribe or desubscribe. Not bothering

I also have a version which is able to talk directly with the lsv process.
It works significatly better then the one which uses sendmail to talk to
listserv.

Your idea sounds okay however as you know, you don't want to increase your
workload so be very carefull.

Regards

Daniel Saffioti
Information Technology Services
University of Wollongong


> 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