All accounts are activated and fully accessible as soon as you follow the confirmation link in the account activation e-mail. That e-mail is sent out immediately after you submit your account information to the site, barring any problems.

Accounts are generally submitted to the system without problem, but all account applications are passed through a number of security checks to ensure a lack of problems occur (such as duplicate account submissions, bot attacks, etc.). If, for some reason, your account submission is flagged by the security system, the administrative staff are notified of the problem so they can manually check the account and send the account approval e-mail. False alarms in this regard are very rare.