Alan So writes:
Instead, if the core team believe that the feature is useful and is willing to incorporate the feature to the main branch, I think that it is a better way of handling it.
For some reason, admins always feel that way. ;-) We feel the opposite way. :-) Let me explain why.
This is a *really big* ask. *Every* configurable element of every screen has some sort of default, and somebody somewhere probably wants to be able to customize it. As my mentor on another project used to ask, "Why do all the defaults suck?" The answer seems to be, "well, they just do." For somebody, somewhere, anyway.
The problem isn't writing the code, I doubt it would be difficult to come up with boilerplate to allow sitewide configuration of all the defaults for all actions. The problem is thinking about the admin's user interface for this. Sure, we could put some kind of mechanism in settings.py, but how do we document all the configurable defaults? How do admins discover them except by asking on mailman-users? And changing that much code would probably be pretty tedious.
The change is also supposed to be more aligned with the design.
I don't understand what that's suppposed to mean. If you do it, you're changing a default, that's all. There's no real design here. It's just a question of the greatest good for the greatest number, which is an empirical question. You have a different answer for your site than most Mailman sites (which are open subscription and normally the admin has no real-world connection to subscribers, so verification of address is needed). Your request is perfectly reasonable, but similar requests for site configurations of every other default would be just as reasonable -- which implies a lot more work for us than you're willing to do for your list admins. Am I missing something?
Steve