I think we're good for now. If I run my select at showthread_start and simply save everything to $countries, will that be accessible by my plugin in the postbit?

After testing, it seems no matter where I put the $countries selection it does not execute. Do sql executions not work in plugins?

I do queries all the time with them. As long as your query comes after the file has required global.php you'll have a database connection. Do you have a function that needs $countries? Use "global $countries;" in it.

If your plugin is inside an existing vbulletin function (and I suspect it is) you have to get $countries inside the function. You could use the line

$vbulletin->countries = $countries;

after your query and then refer to it that way in your plugin, or if that doesn't work refer to it as

$this->registry->countries

in your plugin.

Okay, here are my plugins, which are not working (or at least no flags are showing up):
showthread_start
postbit_display_complete
Note: When I attempt to var_dump the $countries array after it's created, I get null, so the query itself is not being executed, even though you'd think that this was LONG after the global.php had been included...

I'm not very good with sql. What are your actual field names? I would try using those instead of 0 and 1.

And try

$result = $vbulletin->db->query_read_slave($sql);

$db doesn't always work but $vbulletin->db should

Update: When I switched from using the $vbulletin->db commands to just using mysql_ commands everything worked. ^^

That's strange. When you require global.php it requires various other files such as includes/core.php which has all the database stuff.

Glad you got it working.