Admin approval required for membership - is this possible?

[nakedanvil]

The discussion (I thought) mostly was concerned with moderating new registrants. COPPA's are (I believe) just a special class of "users awaiting moderation".

If you are using moderation, you evaluate registrants and then assign them to usergroups depending on your own criteria. But even "guests" and registrants are distinct usergroups to which you can assign a set of permissions.

Some of the confusion stems ( I think) from the different terminology used by PHPBB and vBulletin. vBulletin has much more robust permissions requiring more exact word definitions. This allows for very exacting permissions to be established. The flip side is that PHPBB, having fewer choices, is simpler and easier to use.

[Mermaid]

The discussion (I thought) mostly was concerned with moderating new registrants. COPPA's are (I believe) just a special class of "users awaiting moderation".

Yes, I understand. My problem is that enabling "moderation" for new registrants would do exactly what I want, if it worked all the time. My problem is that when COPPA is also enabled, it doesn't work as a system to moderate all new registrants, as they then all get a message asking for a parental form, which is a bit crazy for a 56 year old.

So I still don't know if this is a bug or whether there is a workaround for me. It seems if I want all registrants automatically moderated, I cannot have COPPA enabled.

[Mermaid]

A further thought:

Thanks to everyone who's answered. maybe I didn't word the original post too well. I do understand that phpbb and vbulletin have different ways of doing things.