Hey! I've been on the list a few months now hoping someone will bring this up, as I've been unable to find it in the FAQ (although I have a geeky friend who tells me it's a problem he's seen before.) I run 4 comparatively small mailing lists (the biggest is about 150 subscribers.) I am hosted by nomonthlyfees.com, which seems decent most of the time, but has been really terrible about this particular problem. It's compounded by the fact that they have a web interface for subscribe/unsubscribes and charge extra for SSH access, which is not something I particularly want to purchase, since 1) it would necessitate learning how to use it, and, for the most part I get along pretty well without it and 2) I'm a poor college student. I've customized each list to send custom subscribe/unsubscribe messages. Of course, I upload these files to the directories of their respective lists. The problem is that Smartlist sends whichever sub/unsub custom message I've uploaded most recently to every subscriber who attempts to subscribe or unsubscribe, (it sends them respectively, i.e., doesn't confuse subscribe messages with unsubscribe messages) regardless of the list with which they're trying to interact. Restated, a prospective subscriber for the XYZ list gets whichever custom list subscribe message I uploaded most recently rather than the message appropriate to the list of interest. The only thing that makes sense to me is that the files are hard linked someplace, and I think I could persuade the techs at nomonthlyfees to fix the problem if I could pinpoint it more exactly. Of course, I could be wrong. Thanks in advance for any advice! Matthew Poe
At 10:50 AM -0500 1/7/02, Matthew Poe isrumored to have typed:
Er...I forgot the subscribe.txt file was hard-linked, but creating a test list did indeed create a hard link to .etc/subscribe.txt (anyone know why this particular file is linked instead of copied?). You need to tell the...support...persons at your provider to use ../.bin/delink on the subscribe.txt files in every list directory. Or...you could always cheat and use FTP commands to delete the subscribe.txt file in the list directory, and then transfer a new one in - this is likely to be more expedient, particularly considering your providers couldn't figure this out on their own. Of course, I don't know if you'll need to do future editing on your local machine, since I neither use nor like web-based text editors.
I upload these files to the directories of their respective lists.
Delete the subscribe.txt file first, which should break the link. (Shows you how much I know about FTP...I assumed that uploading a file would delete the original link and create a new one instead of overwriting the same link. Guess I really _need_ a shell to get any work done.) Charlie
participants (2)
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Charlie Summers
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Matthew Poe