Bob and all - as of a few days ago, I've noticed a bunch of new pending subscriptions coming through on old lists. For example, sketch-devel, last posted to in 2006. https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/sketch-devel/
The question is, what to do about these pending subscriptions, the goal being not to have the problem keep recurring. What I plan to do, for inactive lists, is (1) change subscribe_policy to confirm, (2) ensure default_member_moderation=yes, (3) discard the pending requests, (4) write the given list owners. For the occasional list that is still active, do (4) first. About half a dozen lists are involved so far, with more coming in every day or two. Some of them are completely disabled (e.g., choicetool-generic), but our method of disabling (renaming the domains/* file) does not stop subscribing. The requests hang around indefinitely, clearly the purported list owners are MIA (not unexpected). What the lists have in common is that subscribe_policy is set to "approve", or perhaps "confirm and approve" (https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/admin/sketch-devel/privacy, for those who know our mailman password). Thus I expect that similar subscriptions are already being automatically added to most lists which are just "confirm". And that should be fine, since we've been trying to set default_member_moderation=yes in general, for exactly this reason. Unfortunately mailman has no straightforward option to disable new subscriptions; it's necessary to "edit the public HTML pages" and that seems like both too much effort and generally undesirable. Another approach would be to just let the requests pile up forever, but that doesn't seem too great either. I'm writing here mostly just to announce the situation in the interest of transparency. Of course if someone has some brilliant idea about something else to do, so much the better ... best, karl
