Hi folks,

I find myself in a bit of a pickle and am looking for some
suggestions.

My situation is as follows:

We have for years now, automatically subscribed students to their "class
mailing lists" and their respective "yearly mailing lists".  At
registration, students can indicate whether they want their e-mail address
to be published (on our public ph server, etc.).  The program that
feeds Listserv the student names and e-mail addresses for these lists
grabs ALL students from our registrar's database.  If a student indicated
that they wanted their name and e-mail address to be private, the word
PRIVATE appears after their name when an instructor does a REVIEW of their
list.

The problem:

A new administration policy governing access to student information is
forthcoming which will prohibit an instructor who owns a list from having
access to the list of students subscribed.  In order to be in compliance
with this new policy I thought I could create a Super List for the
instructor that he or she would own and use a Sub-List=xxxxx-s for
students I add which the instructor would not own.  For the record, I
don't think it is appropriate that an owner of any list should be
restricted from the subscriber list, but my hands are tied.  At any rate,
instructors have been informed, and they are furious because they use
their class mailing lists in ways unanticipated by management which
requires access to their subscriber list (a long story left out here).

I have been asked to explore other technical solutions that would keep
everyone happy and be in compliance with new policy.  I can only think of
three solutions when I rack my brain, and I don't think the first two are
possible without access to Listserv's source code and I don't like the
third. They are:

1. Find a way for Listserv, when presented with a REVIEW request for these
lists, to parse the subscriber list and omit any entry with the word
":PRIVATE:". (This will leave the instructor with access and the
instructor can operate as before with limited REVIEW output.)

2. Find a way for Listserv, when adding subscribers, to parse the
name field, and when finding the word :PRIVATE:, add this student
to the sub-list=xxxx-s while adding others to the super list. (SAA)

3. Move all student mailing lists from Listserv to Graffitti (the latter
is a home grown chat for courses with a web interface; hardly as
functional as Listserv.).

Any ideas about how I could do 1 or 2 above or has anyone else been in
a similar situation and is willing to share their solution?  Thanks
for your time.

--Trish
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Trish Forrest
ITS - Queen's University
545-2014