Nope. Not the same. What this feature is would be a piece of functionality where a user would be allowed to create a topic, but it remains hidden until a moderator approves it.
In the SitePoint example, we have a forum which allows users to post requests for site reviews. When this forum was first created, we found that everyone was making review requests, but no one but staff was willing to provide a review, so a “pay it forward” approach was created where users are now required to provide three decent reviews for other users before they can make a review request. To enforce that, all new threads in that forums go into our moderated state so that a team member can review their request for appropriateness (no warez, no pr0n, nothing illegal), and that they’ve made an honest effort and done their three reviews. We’ve actually got a hacked solution now which prevents posting without three posts in the forum first, but we still moderate the post so a human can review their reviews and ensure it is more than “Hey! Looks good” or “Nah, don’t like it”.
For us, this provided two benefits. One, it cut down on spam as people can’t join just to post their link in there. Two, users found benefit as while they reviewed other sites, they started to take notice of areas of improvement on their own sites, so when they started their own review requests, it was one a more polished product out of the gate.