I'd like to bring two *important* points to your attention. If any of the
monitors want to add this to the FAQ's - please go ahead.

1) I am getting a few messages every day of the following form:

> I was a subscriber to the list until about a week ago and I was somehow
> dropped from the list. Over the past year and a half this has happened twice
> before. Each time I have had to resubscribe. Any ideas about how/why this is
> happening to me? and how to stop it in the future?

Yes, I know what's going on. Every day various accounts from the thousands we
have subscribed have either full mailboxes, accounts removed or locked or have
their sites email host go down for an extended period. All of these cause a
bounced message to me, from each failed account for *every* message to *each*
list that the account is a subscriber to. This means that I get about 500-1000
bounces daily.

I run an automatic program every two or three days which unsubscribes those
list-members who have bounced more than ten messages over a period. All in all
this means about 100 people get unsubscribed each week or so. That's what is
happening. You just need to resubscribe to start receiving messages again.

2) I am getting a few messages every day of the following form:

> I just tried to (re)subscribe to the Forgotten Realms list by sending a note
> to majordomo@MPGN.COM and received a note back saying that my request had
> been forwarded to you. I am extremely confused.

The problem here is that someone sent the following request to
majordomo@mpgn.com:

WRONG: subscribe realms Billy Bob
WRONG: subscribe realms my.address@some.domain.com

this is the correct way:

RIGHT: subscribe realms

The WRONG ones above tell majordomo that you don't want to subscribe from the
account you are sending, but in fact you want to subscribe someone else. It
then sends the requests on to me for approval. I then ignore those messages, so
nothing gets done.

I don't ignore similar ones for unsubscription, but I don't have the time to
deal with 50 or so a day of these failed subscriptions - so the only way to
subscribe is to get the subscription syntax right.

Thanks for listening.

Alistair.