Just a quick question. I need a closed forum. Registration will need to be validated by an admin on the basis of a club membership number (extra field: no great problem). Is user validation already in the trunk or planned for a future release or will I have to write it myself. I'm not in a great hurry, but this could be a showstopper if I can't get it sorted or if the effort is too great.

Alternatively, I could completely disable the user registration and create users in the CMS.

Alternatively, has anyone written a bridge to the PHPBB membership functions? (Although PHPBB is overkill for what we need.)

Is user validation already in the trunk or planned for a future release or will I have to write it myself

What is planned for trunk is email confirmation. A user has to verify their email before using the forum. However I hadn't planned on implementing admin validation. You will probably have to write this yourself.

Alternatively, I could completely disable the user registration and create users in the CMS.

You could do that, or I think all forum registrations go into a group if I remember called forum-members. What if you have another group forum-posters and all the forums where set to only be accessed by forum-posters. To 'moderate' a member you would move it from forum members to the forum-posters group.

All I think custom you would need then in terms of functionality is to email the admin after a user signs up asking for them to move member X to the new folder.

Yes, in another thread, somebody talked about using a pending users group with an email to admin. It shouldn't be difficult, even for an old C and COBOL programmer like me. An email to the user saying their membership is being validated and another when they are validated should also be easy enough.

Hmmm, quick and dirty by tinkering with the code or properly as an extension. Decisions, decisions.

@Willr any progress on the email confirmation? (As in "A user has to verify their email before using the forum")