Thread: Opinions please - Moderating registrations

Opinions please - Moderating registrations

I'm considering moderating new registrations to my site because roughly 1/3 of the registrations I get never end up doing anything (create a listing, post a comment or review etc.).

I would be using gravity forms to build a form with all the fields in the create listing form + things like username, mailing list sign up etc.

What would happen then is that if they appear genuine, I would manually create each user and their listing, with a free period of six months or so. After the free period they would have to renew the listing within vantage and pay the subscription fee.

If my site goes well I would expect to have between 1000-2000 members.

My question is would all the extra work be worth it?

A few advantages I can see is that; 1. I won't have a whole bunch of useless users taking up space on the database, 2. I can make sure people fill out their listings properly and not just leave the overview blank (which has happened plenty of times), 3. People could register and create a listing using the same form, greatly simplifying the sign up process.

The downsides are obviously the extra work it would require and that users wouldn't be able to register and login right away. They would have to wait until I got around to approving them.

Anybody have any opinions?

(P.S. Users signing up to write review aren't an issue in case you were thinking of that)