From: Richard Childers <rchilder@us.oracle.com>
Date: Wed, 2 Dec 92 21:14:29 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Suggest splitting things up
Message-ID: <9212030513.AA04842@rchilder.us.oracle.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



>>Greetings,  Back on-line again,  after wading through about 225 messages
>>that has accumulated in the last 4 days.   The volume of messages
>>is really getting high,  and perhaps we might want to try and break
>>them up into the following proposed lists.

>Sounds like a fine idea.

"I aggree."

So do I, but a digest ( 225 / 4 == 56.25 messages per day, concatenated
into one giant digest of messages, sans headers ) would also make the
traffic manageable, while preserving the ability for the various groups
to benefit from one another's divergent, but relevant, insights into the
overall process and its possible applications.

Even if you split the list into multiple 'sub-topical' lists, you'll be
'swamped' with N times the maintenance ( and I suspect maintenance is
already a bit of a hassle, with bounce messages and the like 'deluging'
the hapless administrative staff with a 'rain' of problems ), as well
as 'flooded' with N times as many subscribe and unsubscribe requests ...
and will probably still contemplate a digest format eventually.   (-:

An interactive direct mail option should be preserved, in fact, it would
remain the primary entity ... all that's needed is to add some sort of
alias that evaluates to a queue to the list, then write a script to read
the queue ( with some queue management to avoid race conditions ), strip
out all but trivial header information and '> ' those left behind, and
generate email to those individuals whom have transferred themselves from
the primary alias to the secondary digestifier-and-remailer.

There's a thing called majordomo@greatcircle.com that does this, I think.
I don't know if it's public domain, but it does a lot of this, firewalls
and firewalls-digest are both served by it, and I think it also provides
archival services and such. ( There are others, also. )

My $0.02.


-- richard