At 07:01 AM 10/28/2004, Clark Pickett wrote: >I believe that Charles Oriez's answers to Susanne Lamido's questions are >making >a relatively simple process more difficult than it needs to be. It appears to >me that what Susanne is trying to achieve is exactly what we have with a >number >of our EEAC lists. We have 21 active lists. All of our lists are Private. >Eight of our lists require completion of a subscription questionnaire and >approval by the listowners before the subscription is established. For >each of >these lists, we have placed the questionnaire as the text in the ADDREQ1 >template. The first 3 lines of each template contain the following: We have a 700,000 person organization and 900 lists. we originally used but replaced the manual process that Clark suggests because the administrative overhead of verifying the memberships got to be expensive in staff time and other resources. Someone had to review the questionnaire (even if all it had was name, address, membership number), verify the membership against the database, and issue the add command, or send a note back to the person saying that we couldn't find their membership or it had expired. We were getting multiple dozens of those requests a day when we had a manual system, and our staff member was using roughly 30% of her time dealing with them. That exceeded the cost we were willing to absorb. Initial implementation of my solution is more difficult, but day to day management of an automated system, because it requires no human intervention, has been simpler. I joined one of our member only lists at 2 AM this morning, and was making posts by 2:15. With a human intervention required, even if the staffer reacted immediately upon reaching her office this morning and I was the only member asking to subscribe last night, it would be another 2 hours right now before I would be able to make posts to that list. It is entirely possible and even likely that Clark's proposal will serve Susan's needs. However, she didn't indicate though whether we were talking about a 500 member organization with 20 lists that gets one join request a week, or the NRA. An organization the size of the NRA with millions of members would almost certainly have to duplicate our procedure for the same reasons that we implemented it, and would be large enough to find our solution cost effective. -- [log in to unmask] 39 34' 34.4"N / 105 00' 06.3"W http://www.wolfpacksfortruth.org "about 15 percent of the people are screwballs, lightweights and boobs and you would not want those people unrepresented in Congress." -Alan Simpson, former US Senator (R, Wyoming)