Implementing moderation of new members

Implementing moderation of new members

[Ben Schmidt]

Hi, once again,

And here's the final thing on my wish list for now!

A feature that can be handy is having new members moderated until they are 
approved to post. This can be used to cut down spam, as basically new members are 
either approved once their first post is moderated and they are seen to be real 
people without evil intent :-), or they are unsubscribed (and possibly banned) 
when they are discovered to be spammers, without polluting the list with the spam.

One way I thought of for implementing this could be to have a mode where new 
members automatically add a rule to control/access that causes them to be 
moderated. Another, probably better way, would be to have a tunable which is a 
list of moderated members, to which new members can be automatically added if desired.

An access list for subscriptions is also a desirable feature, and would work 
nicely with this other one: members upon their first post would, as a matter of 
course, either be added to the ban list or removed from the moderated list by an 
owner/moderator.

How does this idea sound? Does the moderated list seem like an OK way to do it? Or 
should the existing access list be used? What about a subaccess mechanism? An OK idea?

Ben.