This process works well but it can also turn away a ton of people from ever joining.
I know there's this one product that only offers support through public forums and new accounts need to be reviewed by a moderator and then you're not allowed to post any threads until you've made a few replies to other threads and it's been white listed by a moderator, and then on top of that and you also can't use links until you've met some other criteria.
But in order to get proper support it requires linking to large files (videos) that aren't able to be uploaded directly through the forums.
It becomes such a pain in the ass to open a support request. It could easily take over a week just to post your question and the worst part about it is the forum software orders posts by date, and your post will be buried on the 8th page before it's visible because it takes your original pre-moderated post date as when it was created.