Information technology evolves rapidly. While some of the information on these pages may still be valid, some of it is also outdated and will not be revised. For assistance with a computing problem, please contact the Computing Help Desk

Class Participants Lists

As class participant lists assume greater importance, not just as mailing lists, but also for such purposes as restricting access to Web pages, the need to improve the handling of these lists increases.

Anticipating this need, IS has developed a process for automatically generating class lists from the Registrar's data. The results are like the lists that have been in common use, but have the added feature that they are automatically generated and updated each night (no more typing long lists by hand).

Term-based lists

There are 4 lists automatically generated for each class, each term. (Note that the 01 is from the academic year, which starts in September; September 2000 is the start of academic year 2001, thus the fall semester which starts in September 2000 is Fall-2001.)

For example, for 23.001, the lists would be:

fa03-23.001: The main list, which contains the 3 lists below:
fa03-23.001-reg: Automatically generated each day from the Registrar's current list of students registered for the subject. This list should not be modified by you; any modifications to this list will be overwritten each night. This list contains the same students as the list available through Websis (http://student.mit.edu), and neither list may be complete and accurate for the first few business days of the term.
fa03-23.001-staff: List of administrative staff. At present this must be set by the Faculty Liaisons, who will add you to this list at your request. When you're on this list, you can add and remove others using moira, listmaint, blanche, or the web moira interface, (or you can have the Faculty Liaisons do this at your request).
fa03-23.001-others: To be used for students who should be in the class but who are not yet on the official list while their class registration paperwork is being processed. This list needs to be updated manually by the staff (that is, anyone on the fa03-23.001-staff list) or Faculty Liaisons.

Using the lists

While fa03-23.001 is both a mailing list and a group, and may be used as is for either purpose, we can also set up lists/groups for you with simpler names to serve as aliases. Please contact the Faculty Liaisons (f_l@mit.edu, or x3-0115) for help.

Note that if you use the lists in this way, the aliases will need to be updated each term to point to the current term's list(s). This will not happen automatically; contact the Faculty Liaisons to have us take care of the updates, or to help check the status of your lists.

For example:

For a mailing list, we can create 23.001-students, containing one or more of the above lists.
Usually, you would want this to contain fa03-23.001-reg and fa03-23.001-others, so that anyone on the -reg or -other will receive mail you send to "23.001-students@mit.edu". (If you want all of the course staff to receive mail to the list, we would instead set it up to consist of the main list, fa03-23.001.)
If you want to restrict locker access, we can make 23.001-students a group (as well as or instead of a mailing list).
You can give system:23.001-students read access to subdirectories of your course locker, or put group 23.001-students in your .htaccess.mit file for restricting access to web pages.
See http://web.mit.edu/acs/LockerGuide.html#HDR3.2 for details on controlling access to Athena subdirectories, and http://web.mit.edu/acs/webguide/restricting.html for details on controlling access to web pages.

To view the membership of a list including members of any sublists, use the -r argument to the blanche command on athena, e.g.

     athena% blanche -r 23.001-students

Important considerations

The ...-reg list is the same as what is available through Websis.
The list should be complete and accurate by the Monday after the start of the term.
Anyone you consider a student who is not yet registered for the course should be added to the ...-others list. This does not affect their registration status in any way. They must still complete their registration as usual.
Duplications between the ...-others and ...-reg lists are harmless, so it's not necessary to remove someone from ...-others when their registration is complete.

| Academic Computing | Contact us
Last modified: Nov 1 17:19:35 2002