Moderate site creation in multisite

Hello.

I’m hoping someone on the forum can help me with this question.

My department is running a WordPress multisite for our college. We want to allow users to create their own sites, but not get access to them until the sites are approved by our department.

I’ve enabled the option “Logged in users may register new sites”. This works great because it automates the process of site creation and allows the user to select their own subdomain name. However, once the process is complete, the user can go directly into their new site. I would like to find a way to hold the site in a queue until we can approve it before the user has access to it.

If there is not a way to do this, then my follow-up question – if we don’t allow users to create their own sites, is there an automated way to at least allow them to select their own subdomain name that will search the existing subdomain names in our multisite and not allow duplications?

Thanks.
Laurie