Date: Sun, 19 Mar 1995 16:52:31 +0900
From: Stephen Turnbull <turnbull AT shako DOT sk DOT tsukuba DOT ac DOT jp>
To: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu
Subject: What on earth is going on there at Clarkson?

It's not that hard to figure out if you look at the messages you're
complaining about (and including in your messages, even! :-) :-).  A
listserve newbie, "charles AT kronos DOT com", managed to add djgpp-announce
to the djgpp list.  Or maybe he's not a newbie, maybe he's trying to
convince you that we *need* a newsgroup (after all, we do need a
newsgroup :-), and is cleverly disguising himself that way since we're
not supposed to discuss the newsgroups here, but rather on news.groups.

You may have missed "djgpp-announce was ADDED to the djgpp list" ack
from the listserv; but you definitely saw the "djgpp-announce was
DELETED from the djgpp list" ack: Mike Feldman included it in his message.
That, plus the guy complaining that regular traffic was coming over
the djgpp-announce list, shows that the two lists were in an infinite
loop (djgpp is subscribed to the djgpp-announce list).  The reason you
saw a couple of "djgpp-announce was NOT FOUND on the djgpp list" is
that several alert readers saw the ADDED ack and moved to cut the
loop; only the first one worked, of course.

Why such bogus ADDs aren't filtered out by the listserv software is a
question I can't answer; it presumably has something to do with the
convenience of having djgpp on the djgpp-announce list.  But ... if I
were the software writer I would filter out "add <existing-list>"
messages, and make the listserv admin add lists to the mailing list
file by hand---it can't be all that common, and you *do* want it to be
hard to do by experienced hackers, let alone newbies.

-- 
Stephen Turnbull  /  Yaseppochi-gumi  /  <turnbull AT shako DOT sk DOT tsukuba DOT ac DOT jp>
http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/      anon FTP: turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
Check out Kansai-WWW, too ------------> http://pclsp2.kuicr.kyoto-u.ac.jp/