[Savannah-hackers-public] bad list subscriptions

[Karl Berry]

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