Hi Ruben and thanks for your follow-on reply.
I've pretty much concluded that "Newbies" and "Preview" is an either/or choice.
I don't want to use the Preview group as the default group with promotion to Users because I don't want new forum users to have to wait until their posts are approved. I created the "Newbies" mechanism with a 5 minute wait between posts for new users because we had a rash of spammers joining the forum and making a couple dozen spam posts before they could be shut down (and yes, stop forum spam is enabled). The Newbies mechanism has been very effective since few spammers are willing to invest that kind of time on a single site.
Preview is for another purpose entirely. It is to prevent an existing user who's angry at something/someone from running amok on the forum. It has also been useful when someone has been given a temporary ban in preventing them from causing damage out of vengeance upon their return.
So to summarize:
- Newbies is for new users. The permissions are the same as for regular users except the post interval is set to 5 minutes.
- Users is the group Newbies is promoted to after 10 posts. The permissions are the same except there's no restriction on post interval.
- Preview is for "problem cases" where we want to see (and approve/disapprove) what's posted before it appears on the forum.
So any trouble maker who has been on the forum for a while will be in "Users" and "Preview" after their first post. There's no way that I can think of to enforce approval of new posts for a user who is in two groups, one of which has "New posts are moderated" set to "1" and the other set to "0".
There's no way to have all three capabilities that I can think of.
I also don't see a way to use "-1" to accomplish what I'm trying to do.
I'm concluding it really is an either/or choice.
