Thank you Rick for your reply. At the present time my group will not authorize additional funds for disbursement to open a support ticket. Here is what I did to correct the problem in the meantime
Edit newuser.inc.php: Commented out the subroutine that requires the board rules are accepted. This resolved my immediate problem with net new registrations.
Then in the Control Panel I selected the "Force Users to Accept Rules on Next Visit" option.
End result is a new registration will still see the Board Rules but after registration instead of before registration.
One quirk is that when the board rules are accepted the redirect takes them to the root of the domain instead of the forum page. At first I thought a path was incorrect in the control panel but everything else seems to function correctly.
