I filled that that subscribe form twice, in both of them I got this:

Your subscription request has been received, and will soon be acted upon. Depending on the configuration of this mailing list, your subscription request may have to be first confirmed by you via email, or approved by the list moderator. If confirmation is required, you will soon get a confirmation email which contains further instructions.

Curiously, however, I just did it again and I got an appropriate confirmation letter.

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Back to the issue, I like to follow the bash configuration idea, you first have your system-wide configuration and then each user can overwrite certain configurations in his/hers local file. So, whenever you update Geany, you would update everything, but the user's specific modifications of the configuration defaults.