Mark Sapiro writes:
My original point is the presence of a nonmember role should not prevent the user from subscribing. If there is an issue with subscribing it is probably because of the outstanding subscription request waiting moderator approval.
I don't think it is likely, but is it possible that the moderator is not just refusing the subscription, but banning the address from subscribing?
I understand that you would like the nonmember role to disappear, but that isn't going to happen in the distribution, and I can't undertake the extensive effort required to figure out how you can do it for your site.
It seems to me that explicitly displaying the nonmember role is an internal and/or administrative need, and most ordinary users are only interested in whether they are subscribed or not. If the list appears in "their" list of list, they're going to assume they're subscribed. (We've even had that confusion about moderators and owners in the past.) I haven't done any deep thinking about this, but perhaps we could provide a more streamlined view tuned to this specific need? That is, the role won't go away, but at least in some contexts you'll have to ask explicitly for that user-list relationship to be displayed.
Also, IIRC Allan's community contains a substantial group of folks with visual impairments, presumably including admins and moderators. Especially to serve that circumstance I think it makes sense for us to provide streamlined views that are more easily grasped as a whole where we can.