Well, upon digging further, relatively good news:
No actual list membership changes needed, so not even anything
members/subscribers need check on this - no changes there.
Turns out in my mailman2 --> mailman3 conversions, some of the recording
and reporting I implemented on that isn't quite right. Corrections shall
be reflected starting next month in the monthly stats reporting (but
unfortunately can't correct the earlier data retroactively).
Details for the interested:
mailman2 and mailman3 don't have a one-to-one mapping of membership
roles, so some of the recording (notably periodic archiving) and
reporting of that wasn't correct. Most notably mailman3 introduces a
new role of nonmember - which apparently is all that have ever posted to
list but aren't currently member of list. That was erroneously captured
in the recording, etc. via the (pseudo) role all. That will be
corrected. So, yeah, the large bumps up I saw in the reporting, weren't
actually members, but any address that ever posted to list but was no
longer member, even if only once from very long ago as some one-off spam
or other posting that shouldn't have made it through - so that's also
why at first I thought the bump up in numbers looked to be from some
bot(s) on the email addresses - they looked to be mostly bot addresses.
And, stumbled across one more slightly odd annoying thing with
mailman3's reporting, if one asks for members, regardless specifying
explicit role, or default, for any list, if there are no matches,
it reports the list name, but with @ replaced by ., and has no members
and writes that to stdout and gives exit/return result of 0. So,
that's one more thing I should code around to potentially avoid some
garbage ending up in recorded lists of data (if I ask for a list of
relevant members of a role, that's all I want, no more, no less, not
some line to stdout telling me there are none and atop that with
exit/return code of 0). E.g. it's current behavior:
$ mailman members --role moderator balug-admin(a)lists.balug.org
balug-admin.lists.balug.org has no members
$ echo $?
0
$ mailman members --role moderator balug-admin(a)lists.balug.org >>/dev/null
$
On Tue, Jul 1, 2025 at 11:09 AM Michael Paoli via BALUG-Admin
<balug-admin(a)lists.balug.org> wrote:
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Michael Paoli <michael.paoli(a)berkeley.edu>
> Date: Tue, 1 Jul 2025 11:08:33 -0700
> Subject: [BALUG-Admin] BALUG-Admin list purge!
> So, the BALUG-Admin(a)lists.balug.org list,
> looks like sometime between
> 2024-08-01 and 2025-05-01,
> likely some bot or the like subscribed lots of email addresses to the
> BALUG-Admin(a)lists.balug.org list:
> > YYYY-MM-DD announce talk admin
> > 2025-05-01 566 433 146
> > 2024-08-01 497 232 32
> So, I'll be looking over those additions, and
> WILL PURGE most of those additions (those that seem likely to
> be bot subscriptions/additions). I may inadvertently remove some
> that are legitimate subscriptions. I'll update once I've completed
> that purge. So, if you receive this email, but not that one,
> you may have been unsubscribed. One can also check the archives
> (list is publicly archived) to see if/when that subsequent posting
> has been sent, this list is currently archived at:
> https://lists.balug.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/balug-admin@lists.balug.or…
> I'll also send additional information at that time (notably including
> how to check if one is still subscribed, etc.). I will not be emailing
> out list of the specific email addresses removed.
> I expect I'll have this completed within 24 hours.
>
> After this purge on the BALUG-Admin list, I'll likely proceed similarly
> for the BALUG-Talk and BALUG-Announce lists, as looks like those
> probably also experienced similar large bumps in subscriptions via
> (presumed) bot(s). I may also do likewise for BALUG-Test list,
> though that list is not of as much concern.
>
> On Tue, Jul 1, 2025 at 6:01 AM Michael Paoli via BALUG-Admin
> <balug-admin(a)lists.balug.org> wrote:
> > ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> > From: Michael Paoli <Michael.Paoli(a)berkeley.edu>
> > To: BALUG-Admin <balug-admin(a)lists.balug.org>
> > Cc:
> > Bcc:
> > Date: Tue, 01 Jul 2025 13:01:01 +0000
> > Subject: [BALUG-Admin] BALUG: Lists, stats, etc.
> > dates, lists, number of members:
> > YYYY-MM-DD announce talk admin
> > 2025-07-01 559 466 148
> > 2025-06-01 556 447 146
> > 2025-05-01 566 433 146
> > 2024-08-01 497 232 32
> > 2024-07-01 497 232 32
> > 2024-06-01 498 231 33
> > 2024-05-01 499 231 33
> > 2024-04-01 500 230 33
> > 2024-03-01 498 230 33
> > 2024-02-01 499 229 33
> > 2024-01-01 497 227 31
> > 2023-12-01 497 227 32
> > 2023-11-01 496 249 32
> > 2023-10-01 496 248 32
> > 2023-09-01 497 248 32
> > 2023-08-01 498 248 32