It will take you 30min max to upgrade a heavy modified board... if you know what you are doing. Plus the difference between editing directly the files, compared to hooks usage, is huge. Even the vBulletin developers said that writing the code directly to files is way better then using the hooks. Then, even if you use only hooks, there is no guarantee the code will still work on the new vBulletin version, so you are stuck already. While editing the code by yourself, you learn about PHP and see exactly what it has to be done, in order to fix everything.
The hooks are for people who don't code or are lazy to learn few basics in PHP. Then, why do you want to download hacks if you don't want to learn anything? And how do you know that the plugins you just installed will not destroy your server? Don't take it on a bad way, I simply state the real facts: using hooks is slowing down your code execution. That is compared on real benchmarks. Plus, I bet you 1 million dollars, no (or very few) "hackers" will test their code with benchmarks... just to see how their hack will perform under heavy server stress. You have no idea how many bad hacks you can find here at vBulletin.org site.
The code thincom2000 made is good from a technical point of vue. But what do you think it will execute faster: my 5 lines of code grouped in one location... or his 200 lines spread all over the hooks and templates? Many people don't realize how bad it is to load your board with a lot of hook inserted code.
I'm totally against modifying your vBulletin board. I don't see any need to add a ton of hacks that will not do any good to your server performance. But if I'm forced to do it, I will definitely edit the vBulletin files. I deal with a lot of clients, like corporate people. I build their server from scratch, including the OS with my own RPM's (PHP, MySQL, etc.) and all the needed software for high performance machine/s. Then, when I install vBulletin, I will always recommend not to insert any hacks on it.
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