Eventually, three more narrowly defined lists, chiapas95-lite, chiapas95-english and chiapas95-espanol were created for the same purpose but with reduced flows of postings. A simple command "who chiapas95", or "who chiapas95-lite", "who chiapas95-english" or who chiapas95-espanol sent to the address majordomo@eco.utexas.edu would produce a list of subscribers.
Over the years the number of subscribers fluctuated somewhat but for a long time always numbered in the hundreds. Some of the subscriber addresses, it should be noted, were way-stations through which the flow of information was routed to other sub-lists of people, so we were never entirely sure how many people actually received our postings. Because a number of our subscribers used the information from Chiapas95 in print, radio and television media, we also knew that it reached even more people than those directly connected to the Internet, but we had no idea how many.
In the fall of 1998, the management of the Chiapas95 lists passed from the Accion Zapatista moderators to a new team of participants, although I continued to participate. This new team created a new architecture which greatly simplified and sped up the filtering of materials and permitted a much wider participation in moderating. In the new system, incoming mail (from lists to which the system subscribed and posts from individuals) were automatically sorted by language and sent to specific "stations" where editors who worked in those languages could login, examine, sort and decide which material to pass along and which to delete. On their way to the stations the messages were stripped of their accents in a way that made them readable to all mail programs (and in a way which made it possible to reinstall the orginal accents) and their subject lines are prefaced with the appropriate language designator, e.g., En; for English. The editors examined the posts, wrote a susccint subject line in English (because most subscribers are English speakers), added the date of composition of the original message and posted it to one or more of the three Chiapas95 lists.
About a year after this new way of operating was put in place, a split occurred among those participating. There were a variety of issues, probably including those of personality as well as politics, but the result was that once again the management of the lists was recomposed. This time the team of editors took full control over the operation and in early 2006 all incoming messages passed through a single gateway (chiapas-i@eco.utexas.edu), although script continued to remove accents and assign language prefixes. At that point the managers of the Chiapas95 lists included folks in North America and Europe. The one constant in all these changes has been that the lists have always been operated out of computers in the Department of Economics at the University of Texas, a school well known for its intensive resources and programs in Latin American Studies.
The Chiapas95 team continued to look for new participants to share the load of editing and to invent new, improved software. Folks could always contribute to the lists by sending us observer reports of unfolding events, detailed analyses of current struggles and by forwarding articles found on-line, or scanned from off-line sources. They could also edit from anywhere in the world as long as they had the ability to secure shell to the listserv account and could provide us with verifiable information about who they were (we did background checks for obvious reasons).
Harry Cleaver