A lot of people have been reporting "LISTSERV loops" when processing a pile of X-DEL jobs from Albany. Well, these are no loops, it just takes several hours for the jobs to run on small machines, and this is why netwide DELETE has been removed from 1.8a, as announced in April when 1.7f was released. The problem is not in making the code more efficient, which can always be done, but in the simple fact that the design of netwide DELETE (sending a list of all your expired userids to all the LISTSERVs) doesn't scale up. With maybe 50 sites using that service, we have barely managed to keep the costs to a reasonable level. If just half of BITNET were using it, every LISTSERV site would have 1-10 million userids to look up in all lists at the end of each semester, of which maybe a dozen would be found. This design was used because nothing else was available at the time; we could either do it this way, or not do it. Nowadays you don't need to use netwide DELETE at all if you run LMail, MX or PMDF (I realize most Internet hosts run things like sendmail or some kind of PC mail system, but in practice these sites never did use netwide DELETE anyway). A couple people also expressed their astonishment at the fact that the quality of LISTSERV support has degraded now that LISTSERV has become a product, when one would logically expect the opposite to happen. Well the reason I am not answering questions on the list is that none of the major networks has licensed customer support from L-Soft so far. I would like to remind EARN users that the EARN/L-Soft license explicitly excludes customer support, that EARN is providing this service to its users through the EARN office, and that this is part of the price calculation. L-Soft does *not* think that customer support is not worthy of its attention, in fact it is in L-Soft's interest to provide this service because it brings revenue and ensures L-Soft's software is used to its full potential. However we cannot force people to buy this service, and if we provide it for free nobody will ever buy it (and it costs a lot of money too - the questions you see on the mailing lists only represent about a third of the requests; I have a lot more time for programming now that I don't answer them any longer). Similarly, if the 3 networks which are now considering a global license get the impression that free customer assistance is available from the mailing lists anyway, they are unlikely to get category II licenses and their members will not have access to between-release fixes unless they pay for this service themselves, which many would not do until they are hit by a problem and some VP or other is standing behind them screaming loudly :-) Eric