Comments requested: On Special-Interest Forums

[AnHai Doan <anhai@cs.washington.edu>]

[Viewpoints here are mine and do not necessarily those of the VNSA admin 
board.]

Dear friends,

As the number of VNSA subscribers increases (we are hovering at around 220 at
this moment), the number of daily postings to VNSA also greatly increases.
This is causing a number of problems. 

First, some subscribers are interested only in certain topics, and 
right now they are forced to fish among so many VNSA mails to find what
they are interested in.

Second, some subscribers have limited mail quotas. Too many mails 
from VNSA will corrupt their accounts.

Third, some subscribers do not have mail filtering, and do not want the
digest service. They are having problems handling too many VNSA mails.

For these reasons, I am investigating how we can send selective VNSA
mails to our subscribers (tailored to their interests). 

One possible solution is as follows: we ask our members to put certain
keywords into the subject line of their postings; members then can implement
some primitive mail filter service to filter out unwanted messages. 
However, we do not think this is a feasible solution because (1) judging 
from the human nature we do not think putting keywords into subject lines
enjoys much popularity and can be enforced (please let us know if you 
think we are wrong), and (2) many of our members do not know how to 
implement mail filtering.

Another solution is to create special-interest groups. This works as 
follows:

- We shall keep VNSA as a general-interest forum, and will keep it
(1) DHS/NCS-oriented, (2) free of sensitive and explosive political
and religious issues, and (3) of the highest quality with respect to
the posting content, no small talks, chichat, private e-mails will be
tolerated.

- We shall create special-interest forums (SIFs), such as one for news, one
for literature, one for technological issues, etc.  For each SIF, there will
be a volunteer who filters VNSA mails and forwards to the members of that SIF
only postings related to the topics allowed by that SIF. SIF members will 
also be informed of what is going on on VNSA (perhaps by sending them 
a daily list of subject lines of VNSA postings. SIF members can freely 
participate in discussions on VNSA at any time they want.

I think this solution is more feasible. Any comment? Also, setting up
an SIF is quite easy in terms of managing the sofware; but I am having 
problems in term of finding hosts. I want to scatter SIFs around sveral 
sites, not all cluttered at the Wisconsin site. 

Are there anyone out there who think they can house an SIF? The only thing
you need to do is to talk with your site administrator that you want to house
a small mailing list. Once he/she agrees and adds a few lines into the system
file /etc/mail/aliases, then you and the system administrator are done. We
will take care of the rest. Note: even if you are housing an SIF, you 
don't need to be the volunteer for that SIF.

Comments? Questions? Please let me know. Thanks very much for all of your 
help.

Best, Hai.