How to put new users into a temporary group other than "Members"

[AtariAge]

Greetings,

With my self-hosted forum, I was able to modify the member_group inside conf_global.php to set the initial member group for newly registered members.  I had this set to a group called "New Members". I lost this ability when I moved my forum to Invision's cloud-hosting service.  Now all members are immediately going into the Members group. 

The "New Members" group requires that the first three posts be approved by a moderator (using the "Remove content moderation" setting in the group).  This was done to identify spammers who might otherwise get past manual validation of user accounts.  After 'x' number of posts, the member would then be moved into the "Members" group.

I'd like to know the best way to get back to this setup.  It seems I need to rename the "Members" group to "New Members", and then move existing members into another group I can call "Members" (and this is the group the "New Members" would ultimately be promoted to). I assume the forum is looking at the ID of the "Members" group to assign to new members, and that renaming it is fine? 

I see that bulk moving members from one group to another forces the search index to be rebuilt, which is definitely not ideal (as that takes a long time on my forum with five million+ posts).  I'd also need to make sure the permissions are all setup properly for that new group.  Then rename the old "Members" group to "New Members" and move all the members in the old "New Members" group into this new group (which would cause the search engine to start rebuilding again).  And setup the group promotion in the "New Members" group as I had it setup before.

Do I have this right?  Sure would be nice if we could simply specify what the default member group is from within the ACP.

Thank you,

 ..Al

Edited December 23, 2022 by AtariAge

[Jim M]

Please be advised I have moved this to a ticket. Typically, the advice here is to move the users from one group to another on our Cloud. This would put you in the driver seat and the best way to do this management. However, the footprint of your community is rather large so on occasion we can get around this.

[AtariAge]

Thank you!