Thread:Project:Support desk/Rights only for friends and colleagues/reply (2)

Take a look at Manual:User rights.

You probably want something like this.

The e-mail confirmed is a bit redundant as the lines in the above link require the user to both have you set their account to 'confirmed' and have confirmed their e-mail address. A confirmed e-mail address by itself will do very little for you, except help to hold back spam because bots will create accounts but rarely confirm them. It does ensure people have email enabled. An alternative is to make it to disable all account creation and create accounts for your friends (though you'd still have to disable anonymous editing and block any current accounts you don't want to allow). The manual will also explain what rights exist with what groups by default, which will avoid lots of unnecessary disabling of rights that groups don't have.