One of the great things about a membership website is that it can become an effective community of users that are able to comment on and offer support for the content in your site. When your members can communicate with each other they can work on and extend the content of the site with little input from you. If you can accomplish a self-sustaining membership site like this your task as the owner will be much easier.
Each site owner will have to look at their site and decide if the kind of membership that they recruit is suitable for this kind of full participation website. To a large degree it depends on whether you are running a small live class, a monthly membership or a low priced membership.
With a small live class you probably have had the participants put up a large amount of money in advance for their training. If this is the case then you should allow them full access to participate in and comment on the training without going through a moderation process. You are quite probably going to be giving them a lot of material in a fairly short period of time so you might not have time to spare to moderate a comment board. Leave the board open and if any of the participants does become a problem you can simply remove them from the program.
Perhaps those live training classes that you were running became so popular and you had so much material that now you find yourself with a monthly membership site. The members that you recruit here are going to be different from the ones that were in your live class. The new monthly members probably didn’t take advantage of your live class for a couple of reasons. The first would be that their budget wasn’t up to the fee that you asked and secondly they might not have been sure of your product. You should let these members make comments but direct their comments into a moderation area where you can have a look at them and discard unwanted posts before publishing them in your site.
Some of you might be running a membership site at a low monthly fee. Turn off the comment function for your low-end users. You don’t want them to think that paying the lowest amount gives them unlimited access to you. If you decide later to have levels in your site you could add the comment function as one of the benefits of a higher level.
So remember that the degree of participation and interaction that you want on the part of your members will depend to a large degree on the kind of members that you are recruiting. Small, high fee groups should be allowed to comment fully without being moderated first. Monthly members should be able to comment but be subjected to an editing or moderation process before publishing and low payment members should not be given the ability to comment. This will add value to the process of making comments and encourage members to increase their membership level and participation.
You too can create a full membership site in a single day at: http://www.membershipcube.com