Ian- It was getting so that it would take me at the minimum 2 to 3 HOURS every day just to delete all the spam in pending requests. The setting to DISCARD is NOT discarding "anything that suits me" -- it is discarding 100% SPAM. There was NEVER a legit message there asking for help. I still get the accidental subscriber post that lands in pending requests for a variety of reasons and the moderated list member posts...those I'm more than happy to handle -- but the non-subscriber spam being DISCARDED is the setting I and many other admins CHOOSE (as long as we are not moderating the gateways) AND if RootsWeb had any qualms with admins setting non-subscriber posts to DISCARD they wouldn't have created this option specifically so we CAN have the spam discarded. That is why this option was created! I can do my "job" as admin MUCH better if I have that extra 2-3 hours a day to help people and tend to actual list functions than if I were to devote that time to deleting spam from more than 100 list pending requests. Joan In a message dated 7/31/2012 7:35:20 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, ian_marr@bigpond.net.au writes: Joan, I've sat back for a while while you laud the concept of just "discarding" anything that doesn't suit you, and can't help wondering why you are a list administrator at all. I admin many lists which vary from very slow to relatively busy. There are many aspects to being an admin, and I try to do each justice. Welcoming new members, being sure I respond quickly to queries, publishing a list etiquette fact sheet, monitoring the messages, processing incorrectly addressed messages, dealing with the "pending" list and anything else that may come along. I regard each of these as an integral part of the job. They say any job worth doing is worth doing well. I just can't see how this is achieved if any of us decide we won't do certain aspects because it doesn't suit us. Regards, Ian MARR