As an organization grows, it often becomes necessary to delegate selected administrative responsibilities for some services to individuals scattered throughout the organization. The current privilege class structure in LISTSERV makes it virtually impossible to grant selected administrative privileges to an individual without granting full administrative privileges to that individual. At present, LISTSERV recognizes five classes of privileges: Postmaster (site administrator) List owner List editor/moderator Subscriber Public At the very least, there should be a sub-postmaster class immediately below postmaster, and the postmaster should be able to specify the privileges which should be granted to each individual sub-postmaster. Generally, administrative tasks fall into a few categories, for example: 1. Create new lists; 2. Manage existing lists; 3. Manage user access using 'pwc', 'serve', and related commands; and 4. Manage site-wide settings and templates. There may be others, but these will suffice for this discussion. It should be possible to grant privileges associated with a specific category to an individual sub-postmaster without granting privileges associated with any other category, and it should be possible to grant privileges in different categories to different individuals in the sub-postmaster class. Commands such as 'pwc' and 'serve' should be restricted in a manner that recognizes the access hierarchy, i.e., a postmaster should be able to issue these commands for any address, but a sub-postmaster should not be able to issue these commands for a postmaster or sub-postmaster address. (Related issue: The 'serve' and 'pwc' commands should require the individual administrator's password, rather than the CREATEPW or STOREPW.) There should also be a way to define groups of related lists, so that Category 2 (list management) privileges can be granted for all lists on the server, or for specific groups of lists. For example, central Help Desk staff members might have Category 2 privileges for all lists on the server, while a sub-postmaster in a given college or department would have Category 2 privileges only for the lists associated with that college or department. Our central Help Desk is the clearing point for all account suspension requests, and many tasks associated with account suspension are performed by Help Desk staff. If administrative privileges could be delegated in the manner that I have described, central Help Desk staff would be granted Category 3 (user management) privileges. We have attempted to provide Category 2 privileges to selected support staff by creating special lists to which those staff members are subscribed, then configuring new lists to grant ownership privileges to subscribers on the special lists. However, there is no way to prevent a list owner from removing the special 'Owner=' statement from a list. In addition, we have hundreds of lists which were created before we implemented this scheme, and each of these must be updated manually by the postmaster to add the special 'Owner=' statement. This message is not intended to be an enhancement request (except maybe the part about using individual passwords on 'serve' and 'pwc'). Rather, it is submitted as fodder for discussion regarding future development. LISTSERV currently meets our needs better than any other mailing list management product available today, but there are several areas in which the product could use improvement. This is one of them. -- Paul Russell Senior Systems Administrator OIT Messaging Services Team University of Notre Dame