Is it only me?
 

This is certainly not meant as criticism.... more an (positive, I hope) observation.
How many other people have noticed that a good proportion of mods/hacks simply don't take into account for when people use a MySql table prefix when installing VB?
It's Murphy's law that yesterday I downloaded no less than four mods, and I ended up having to code in the prefix on all four of them :surprised: and let me tell you that my coding skills are akin the that of a retarded earthworm :disappointed:

It is up to the author to add that to his or her own hack, we can't enforce everyone to code to certain standards.

I agree it should be in every hack, but sometimes people do forget, espesscally when they don't use a prefix on their own set-up's.

If people don't use them (like we don't) then it is very easy to miss them from hacks - after all, most people write hacks for their own boards to start with.

I'm not actually sure what the purpose of prefixes is - why are they used at all ?

because people like to have their vb tables have something like "vb3_" in front

personally prefixing is long for me when i'm writing something as it means i can't just throw it into phpmyadmin for bebugging :(

Although it makes it very easy to remove hacks when there are prefixes, especially when there is no uninstall.

I think as a general rule, if you are coding hacks for release here, you should include the table prefix.
Whilst you may not use them personally, something out there who ends up using your hack, may :)

Prefixing could help to organize the tables slightly, especially for some who only have limited creation of databases on shared hosting.

one of them is when you install different things on 1 db like 4images and vb, you'd need to know what table is used for. it's obiviously useful.

It's not too hard to add it to the hack yourself. :) Like Brad said, people who release hacks do it because they want to share what they have on their forums - don't expect them to do ALL the work. ;)

That seems a very strange thing to do. I would never share vB's database with anything else. :surprised:

We have photopost on the same database... or do you mean things that are completely different?

I share Photopost as well.. but since Photopost is an addition, I prefix those tables not vBulletins.

Same here, no prefixes on normal vB stuff~ :)

I don't know photopost - is it vB hack or addon ?

I mean completely different applications - I don't mean addon's to vB like Articles, Arcade, or even Flashchat - these are part of your vB and should use the same db (and should use table names that don't clash with the standard vb ones). Prefixes are then obsolete as the DB has a unique name, and all the tables within it are unique. Nothing is gained.

I'm sure people use them simply because they can - but I can't think of any good reason you should need to use them, and so far no one else seems to have.

From what I know... photopost doesn't have to be used with vB, though it includes a lot of stuff that will do the integrating etc.

We usually have one seperate db for each site on the server.

I haven't run into a single hack that didn't use them, I don't go around installing random hacks though...

Nor do I!
I do have a parallel forum (testbed) running on a phpDev setup, and experiment locally any mods/hacks that look juicy, but I only ever install mods onto my "live" forums that are either useful, or requested/required.

What hacks are you talking about btw ?