Thanks for the feedback, That will work for the meantime.

I'd like to have the option to approve new registrations prior to putting them in the members group.

Does anyone know of a modification to do this? If not, I'm going to write one. If there's demand I'll make it available for anyone else to use.

Based on what I've seen if you require the email verification the user gets placed in group 32000 I believe until they verify.

I'm thinking that upon verification they would be notified that they are pending admin approval and put in group 31999 and an email would be sent to the administrator to approve them.

In addition, it wasn't immediately obvious how to switch a user from that 32000 group to a member in the event that the email failed. Then I realized I could simply set them to member from the admin page. I think the reason that it wasn't obvious is because the screen already showed "member" as their group instead of "32000" which is a non-existant group.

One last feature I'd like (if it doesn't exist) is a way to have subscribe to this topic checked by default on new posts.

Any thoughts or ideas?