An idea on how to make a trial script
 

Lets say you made the expire date 3/5/06

Would it be possible to have a script run until that date and when it is met automatically delete the tables?

Make a conditional that would run a query to drop the tables if the date was the one you want?

Dropping data is not considered a "nice" way of limiting a Trial. It could even be against the law in some places of the world.

Better just to make your script stop functioning. Anyhow without encrypting your files, it would be easy to work around a limit.

Now I need to write a test script that will do this.

The most difficult thing is making hard to edit the trial code

As it's a scripting language PHP is difficult to "encode" or hide the source of. Two solutions that spring to mind are:

- Compiling the code and distrubiting it as byte code of sorts
- Obfuscating it (I'm sure there are products out there, do a search for "php obfuscator" or "php obfuscate")

The first option might be difficult as I suspect you'll need "not-free" software to create the files and it'll rely on the end user having certain modules installed (it's also unlikely to work with the vBulletin plugin system which evals the code).

Just pointers but I hope it's of some use to you :)