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Re: Has Rutgers orphaned the www-security mailing list?

On Aug 19,  9:12am, Prentiss Riddle wrote:
> There is evidence to suggest that the WWW Security Team at Rutgers has
> orphaned the list.  The charter, in particular, is out of date (it says
> that www-security is the discussion group for the IETF working group on
> web security, but I'm told that that group has had its own separate
> mailing list for some time now).  I'm referring to the description of
> the list at:
>
> 	http://www-ns.rutgers.edu/www-security/index.htm
> 	http://www-ns.rutgers.edu/www-security/www-security-list.htm
>
> And there have been so many reports of problems unsubscribing from the
> www-security list that it's hard for me to believe they are all due to
> user error.

Believe me... a lot of the problems were due to user error.  I unsubscribe
people manually often because the users moved from accounts to accounts and
cannot remember which user@host they used to subscribe.

> Even with all of its problems, the www-security mailing list is an
> extremely important forum.  I wish that someone from Rutgers would show
> an interest in this list again by updating and publicizing the charter
> and by testing the unsubscription mechanism.  Active participation in the
> list, encouraging on-topic threads and discouraging off-topic ones,
> would be even better.

I will try and look into a better way for people to unsubscribe.  Please keep
in mind the following.

www-security  has many subscriptions that are local lists to certain
organizations.   eg: www-security@rice.edu  may have an entry and if someone is
on www-security@rice.   There is no way for them to get off of www-security by
way of sending majordomo@nsmx.rutgers.edu.   It would require cooperation and
help from the people who setup the local www-security list from rice.edu.
 Also,
many times the user cannot keep track of their .forward files and it's hard to
find exactly which user@host they signed up as when the userid isn't even
close.

-chil

-- 
Chihli Lu     <luchihli@hardees.rutgers.edu>  |  (voice) 908-445-3493
Rutgers University, Computing Services TD/NS  |    (fax) 908-445-2698
PO Box 0879 Piscataway, NJ 08855-0879         |
--
If I had a Q-TIP, I could prevent th'collapse of NEGOTIATIONS!!
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