In case anyone is interested, I just posted a hack for restricting story submission to members of a group that has write access to a given topic.
Currently, if a given user can submit at all they can submit to any group that they have READ access to. This custom function plus two very small hacks changes this logic so that a user can only submit stories to topics in which they have WRITE access. The hack (based on GL 1.3.9) is on the third page of the following forum thread: http://www.geeklog.net/forum/viewtopic.php?forum=3&showtopic=34657 If anyone finds tis to be a useful feature, I'd appreciate any feedback as to whether or not this works properly for other users. -Zach