Create A Forum - Support Forums

Hello! We have faced some trouble with managing our membergroups. We'd like to prevent freshly registered members from seeing the whole forum, and rather just the public section of it, which is also available for guests to see. We tried creating a new membergroup which inherits the permissions from guests, but it appears newly registered members always go under the "regular members" group and are thus allowed to see the whole of the forum (Another problem is, that even when we manually moved people to the new membergroup, they were -still- able to see the entirety of the forum, although we had only ticked the boxes for the same boards that guests can see). We have an application-system for our forum, which is why we'd prefer new members to see the forum only once they have been accepted, which is when we'd move them to the regular members-group in which they're able to view the hidden section of the forum. Is there any way we can accomplish this?
 
On another note, is it a possibility to remove the social buttons from the forum?
 
Thank you in advance!

I believe you have to physically put new members under a membergroup (called New Member, or whatever you like). I do this. When a member joins, I put him in the new member category. Just create a new category and set the permissions accordingly. I set up a new username, that is a good way to see what "others" can see!