Hi Folks,
A couple of days ago, over on the MAILOP mailinglist, there was a long thread titled 'Mailman confirmation email denial of service'. This detailed some of the problems we've all seen with Mailman subscription spam. The Mailman team has addressed a lot of these problems with ReCAPTCHA support and additional configuration options. Arguably the best solution has been the ReCAPTCHA integration. BUT, a lot of people don't like the Google tie-ins that come with ReCAPTCHA.
Recently, a kind person submitted a patch [1] to Mailman for hCAPTCHA an alternative to ReCAPTCHA. In the discussion of that patch, Mark has stated that he is not interested in any more features for Mailman 2.x. I think that is fine, Mark has given decades of this time to Mailman and I think it's perfectly natural for him to want to move on. He deserves a lot of credit for Mailman's success, both the 2.x and 3.x branches.
So, I have volunteered to spearhead an effort to add one or two more people to the Mailman Coders group[2] in order to vet and approve new features that continue the long tradition of providing value to Mailman 2.x. Who's with me on this?