Upgrading with hacks
 

I have several mods installed on my board and just noticed the security upgrade notice in my admin CP. For security upgrades like this what needs to be done in order to get the upgrade to work correctly?

Do I need to uninstall all mods and reinstall them after, disable them or will they be fine without changing anything.

The mods i have are.

AME - The Automatic Media Embeder
Change Threads Prefix Inline
Cyb - Advanced Forum Statistics
Cyb - Advanced Permissions Based on Post Count
Cyb - Login To User Account
Cyb - PM System Enhancements
Cyb - Visitors in Last X Hours
Live Topic 1.07b
Member Profile Reputation Display
v3 Arcade 1.0.8
Viewable Ban List 1.0.2


Also I was wondering when vB 4 comes out I am assuming I will need to wait until the mods are ported to v4 but does vBulletin keep doing security updates for a good period of time after releasing a new version or do they just offer it for a month or two and then you have to upgrade to the newer version for the security fixes.

Thank you in advance you guys have been awesome :)

you can upgrade with your mods installed. Beforehand you might want to check out the hack threads to see if people report them working with the version your upgrading to.

also MAKE A BACKUP OF YOUR DATABASE/FORUM BEFORE YOU DO ANYTHING

Once you have run the upgrade script, your ACP will tell you if oyu have any updated templates, if you do you can either just save them(not recommended) or compare them with the history, and add any additional code thats been updated.

I had to update 5 styles, each customized, with new template hooks and some changed code.... it had to be done manually, style by style, and template by template, but this allows you to have any updated code that might be required.

Ive seen many broken boards because people didnt care to properly look things through, same with mods, Ive seen many mods that move stuff, but dont move a corrisponding hook or something.

If you have any modified php files, you will want to back those up, and again, I would compare them before editing any code, using something like beyond compare, see if your files need any code changes.... beyond compare makes this easy.

before you upgrade, disable all of your plugins/mods, then enable them one by one after the upgrade, and test your board after each one, to make sure that each mod is working properly.

Its not as hard as it sounds, and I was kind of all over the place there, but it can be time consuming depending on how correctly you want to do it, and how heavily modified your board is.

Thank you very much for the detailed response it was exactly what I was looking for :)