>> I am looking for a product that would process class
>> lists here at the University. Initially, we would
>> like to handle perhaps 500 lists of varying lengths-
>> maybe 20-100 members.
>
>Wow! 500 Lists? Let me guess -- one list for each class
>UoM offers.
>
>I hope you realize that this will be a full time job no matter
>what list manager you use.
I concur -- this is going to be a lot of work. Maybe the way to
solve the problem is to use news instead, and create one newsgroup
per class, making the instructor/TA the moderator. Of course, this
would allow users who are not in the class to read the messages,
but it seems to me that most class-related discussions don't particularly
need to be closed. It also avoids the potential glut of messages --
if there are 500 lists of, say, 50 members each, and each instructor
decides to drop the class a line on Monday morning, that's 25k messages.
We used this solution at Purdue's Computing Center, starting about 1984
or so; it seems to work. If you do go this route, I'd recommend setting
expire times on the class-related newsgroups at ~4 months (or however
long your academic term is) and then manually expiring them all at the
end of the semester. (If students know that the messages will always
be there, they will be less likely to save copies in their own directories;
at the message volume you're contemplating, this is an issue.)
---Rsk
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