Manual Approval of New Topics

[Nomad]

I have seem some forums manually approving topics. While posts are automatically approved, your topics will be manually approved. They say thus is to ensure that only high quality of topics are approved for discussion. Do you think thus is a good strategy to build quality content in your community. Have you tried this method? Did you get quality topics?

[Kane]

If you want to control quality in your community, you can manually approve the topics. But it will be a lot of work if you have an active community. If you do not like the topics being posted, you can always delete them.

[JoelR]

I think it really depends on the context of your scenario, and the trade-off between quality vs delay.  

One thing that I will add though is that forums have not evolved is in providing expectations.  When a topic is moderated, why was it moderated? What is the typical turntime for it to be approved? It's all lost into a black hole.  These are behavioral nudges that we can do much better on modern forums.  

[Nomad]

If you have little activity in your forum and you very well know most poster, there is no need for manual Approval of topics. But in a forum with a lot of activities, you will also be receiving a lot of spam content. If you have a team to moderate content, thus can in some way control low quality content.

[Kane]

If the forum owner is manually approving topics in a hope to quality content, he also need to approve posts manually, as users might also post low quality replies. A lot of forums moderate topics and posts form new users until they find that the user's posts meet the forum standard.