Summary of changes to LISTSERV for List Owners
This document describes changes affecting list owners resulting from the June 24, 2007 upgrade of the LISTSERV software at Wayne State University.
Revamped Web interface
- Completely redesigned in accordance with contemporary web accessibility guidelines.
- List Management Dashboard provides information about all the lists you own including configuration settings, messages awaiting moderation, and data about recent list activities.
- Dashboard display is completely customizable, so you can see exactly the information you want.
- List Configuration wizard greatly simplifies making changes to the list header, and a full explanation of each keyword is just a mouse-click away.
- Several task wizards guide you through common list management tasks.
- For moderated lists, the new List Moderation tool lets you easily view and process all messages awaiting the Editors approval.
- Extensive set of mail templates lets you easily create custom Welcome, Farewell, Error, and Confirmation messages to your subscribers.
- List Report menu lets you produce many different kinds of reports about list activity.
- Easily ADD or REMOVE subscribers, and manage all subscriber information.
- The Web interface itself is completely customizable on a list-by-list basis. The new Edit mode lets you access the component templates of each screen, making it easy to give pages a custom look.
- List Archives now display messages with full HTML and attachments, and may be accessed through an RSS reader.
Improvements to control spam
- For public lists, you can now require non-members to confirm their posts while allowing members to post without confirmation. To do so, in the list header you would set: "Send= Public,Confirm,Non-Member"
- Mail sent to list owners at the "listname-request" address will now require "OK" confirmation from the sender before it is sent to you.
- All e-mail addresses on the web interface are masked until the user logs in.
- A new CONTENT-FILTER mail template form allows you to specify rules by which certain kinds of messages are rejected.
- In the list header, you can now set "Subscription= By_Owner,Confirm" to force a confirmation from a would-be subscriber before the request is forwarded to you.
- You can suppress the "Approved-By:" header that would normally be generated in messages posted through moderated lists. To do so, set "Misc-Options= Suppress_Approved_By" in the list header.
Miscellaneous other changes affecting list owners
- You must have "Change-Log= Yes" in your list header to use of many of the new reporting options available in the List Management Dashboard.
See Change-Log in the List Keyword Reference manual for details.
- If you have modified any of your list's WWW templates, you may need to change them again because of extensive changes to the web interface.
- List owners can now delete individual messages from list archives through the Web archive interface.
- New "Misc-Options=" keyword settings.
- The "Sizelim=" and "Digest=" keywords have been enhanced to allow you to specify a maximum size in either Kb or Mb, rather than in lines.
- You can explicitly cancel an OK confirmation code instead of letting it expire.
- Top and Bottom banner messages will now be displayed correctly in MIME messages.
- Improvements to .HH (Hide Header) tag functionality.
- Ability to send pre-approved messages through new DISTRIBUTE POST command.
Additional Resources
For complete details on these changes, including keyword syntax and product previews, please see the resources below available from L-Soft, Inc.: