My experience is that this is more than just subscribtion requests - any moderator request at all will maintain like this. I now have three domains worth of the daily nags hitting me - two of them were subscription requests, two moderated posts (the posts went through, but the daily nag doesn't get cleared). I posted a bug report on sourceforge for this one...

Brett Delmage wrote:

Problem: I can't clear pending subscription requests by processing them. I applied the patch to 2.1a4 below but it doesn't work for me.

The steps to duplicate the problem are listed below and are very simple.

I created a new list.

I subscribed to the list using email, not the web form, using the list defaults. The subscription was activated without incident.

Using Konquerer (2.2.1) as my browser, I modified the subcribe_policy to "Require approval" then subscribed to it using a different email address.

I received the "Your subscription request has been forwarded to the list administrator" message as expected, as well as the list-owner notification.

I went to the Administrative requests for mailing list: form and confirmed that the pending subscribe request was shown.

I selected the Discard radio button end entered a reason, then the submit button.

I confirmed that the rejection notice was mailed to the subscriber.

However the subscriber was still shown as a subscription request.

I tried resubmitting the form with the Approve radio button selected. The subscriber was sent a welcome message, but still appeared on the form as a pending subscription request.

I selected the Reject radio button end entered a reason, then the submit button. The subscriber (supposedly already subscribed!) was mailed a rejection notice. And still appeared on the form as a pending request. Some users just won't go away ;-)

If left in this state, the daily oustanding moderations nag is mailed to the list owner.

I've looked at the code but am just learning python (part of my reason for using mailman, I figured it was a great 'real world' project to help me learn python.) But I couldn't see the problem. Maybe in a month or two...

I hope the steps to reproduce the problem are helpful. Really, you can't help but encounter it.

Thanks to all those working on Mailman. It's a really impressive list manager despite this bug, which doesn't affect the actual list operation in any way.

-- Joel Lord Systems Architect Information Management Group