[samuli]

I for one would appreciate the possibility for registration approval. I’m currently involved in a zero budget project to launch a forum on a sports related website that runs WordPress as CMS, and registration approval seems to become the last thing we need to solve before choosing bbPress (over Vanilla.) In this scenario, a registration approval plugin for bbPress would naturally be very handy. (I don’t think we have skills to make our own plugin.)

For what the approval thing is needed, then? For example, Vanilla discussion forum uses registration approval in a way we would appreciate to copy for our project. The idea of people not registering an account but applying for one would suit our project really well. “Why do you want to join this forum?” is a question we would like people to answer before letting them post anything.

A Finnish online magazine covering ice hockey, Jatkoaika.com, has a forum that has grown into a lively discussion community for over 13,000 registered users without losing its, well, usefulness. It’s not only because of strict moderation of discussions, they require their users to apply for registration as well. Given that the topic is ice hockey (you know, that game with all the tackling and fighting and strong emotions) and most forum users are hockey fans (“We want blood!”) and male (“We want blood!”), we consider that a great role model for this forum project of ours, even though we don’t expect our forum to become as popular (and we are not about ice hockey.)

(In what comes to our project, we might still decide to NOT having approval for registration. There are advantages in also not having that, of course.)