Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
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.
:-) Thanks for exchanging the idea about adding codes for configuration or making customization. I can say that it is not purely a technical issue in an organization that whether system admin should maintain a few minor changes that are not in the main branch. Due to massive customization made to previous Mailman 2 installation by some student helpers which made it very difficult to be upgraded nearly 20 years ago, we tend not to repeat this pattern when we upgrade to Mailman 3 a few years ago. Therefore, we are now very cautious to accept request that need to change the codes. We do not want to give an impression to our business users that codes of an open-source software can be changed at no/low cost and without any maintenance cost.
I understand that coding is tedious and users often demand a lot of different things especially about the UI. It is one of the reasons why there are a lot of commercial product of opensource backend and closed source frontend. I really appreciate all of these development effort in the mailman project which focused in the (admin) frontend a lot, which usually create great unique differences in a commercial product.
After all, it is just one of the many suggestions that you received. I respect the decision of the core team. If the core team consider that this feature is low priority, it is fine not to implement it.
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
The supposed to here mean that you may try to solve the issue in some other ways. You may not add the options to change the default. I am not sure but maybe make them be settings of list or prompt an alert that a lot of email will be sent to confirm/verify. I believe that you probably read a lot more of opinion from others than me and so I think the core team can judge what should or should not be done after consolidating the opinions.