The sequence reveals that no moderator is both monitoring this list and willing to respond to the request, and possibly the listserver is not working properly.
Yes, the user should be able to handle his own unsubscription and is being obtuse, repeating a message, insistently, to people who can't do anything about the situation, and perhaps not following instructions that come with every mail, or if he is, he is not requesting help, describing the specific problem encountered, he is merely demanding that
someone DO SOMETHING TO FIX THIS!
A common reason would be that the user no longer has access to an account for sending mail, but is still receiving mail to that account. If that is the case here, then Harry isn't telling anyone what the account is. The complete headers from a list mail to him would show what's happening. (Below, I figure out that this is not the case here. It's commonly a case with open mailing lists, this list is, however, closed.)
STOP and all that does absolutely nothing. The instructions below do say how to unsubscribe. One of Harry's mails seems to be a response to a mail from wikiversity-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org and it looks like the subject was not created as instructed for unsubscription.
If Harry tells us what he has done, and what happened, we will then know more specifically what to do about it. I'm not personally going to
file a complaint with the overall wikimedia.org listserver administration unless I can verify a problem. And they are quite likely, given the massive subscription lists, to ignore complaints written in all caps that don't provide adequate information.
On that page, in the "Wikiversity-l" subscribers section, after entering my subscribed email address, I pressed the "unsubscribe or edit options" button.
I got a member options page acknowledging my email address as a subscriber, and one of the buttons was
unsubscribe. I pressed the unsubscribe button, and, after a few minutes' delay, I received a confirmation mail. If I had responded with no changes to that mail, I presume I'd have been unsubscribed. I'd forgotten my password, which is not needed for unsubscription, so I then pressed the password reminder button and my password was emailed to me. Using the password, I logged in to the member options page. There is also an immediate unsubscription option there (since they know it's you because you logged in with the password.)
So I did the same, using the Harry address from the mails. I
then pressed an unsubscribe bottom, which, if Harry is a subscriber, would send him a confirmation mail, with instructions that, if followed carefully, will unsubscribe him. On the other hand, I tested this with a ridiculous subscription address. The interface does not reveal if the person is a subscriber or not.
If Harry does not receive a mail, he can then strongly infer that he is not, under this email address, subscribed to the list. That, then, means that *nobody* can help him, unless he provides the subscription mailing address.
However, it is very likely that Harry is a subscriber, because the list will reject mails from non-subscribers. I just tested that. Harry's mails, from his gmail address, are not being held for moderator approval. (If a moderator has set automatic approval, it would go through, but he'd also be getting the message held for approval message. I've seen a moderator set up automatic bounce approval when the moderation didn't want to surrender control but also didn't have the time to actually manage the list.)
Harry, when you are in the middle of an amygdala hijack, you may not be able to respond to instructions clearly. See if you can do whatever you know to do to relax, have some tea or coffee, get to a place of calm, and then try unsubscribing, reading everything carefully. You may find that this fixes the interface, in a way that shouting doesn't.
The amazing thing here is how long the hijack has lasted.
Plus, I'm getting that we don't have a moderator who is regularly watching this list and ready to fix problems.
From: Shujen Chang <i@blue.cat>
To: Mailing list for Wikiversity <wikiversity-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Sunday, September 30, 2012 8:28 AM
Subject: Re: [Wikiversity-l] Wikiversity-l Digest, Vol 58, Issue 4
You can just unsubscribe this mail list, if you do not want to receive any letters from the mail list again.