Is there anything like
 

<a href="http://www.heatware.com/" target="_blank">http://www.heatware.com/</a> available as a vbulletin plugin?

What does this do?

heatware is a good way to track users that participate in trading forums

the workflow is something like this

before you can trade/buy/sell you register on the site

following that with every successful or not so succesful transaction both parties leave a review of the other on the heatware site.

it is a very good way of ensuring that you arent going to deal with someone that will rip you off
very similar to ebay ratings in that sense

It sounds quite good. I do believe John Eoevie was working on something like this but he left it in the end.

- miSt

maybe I should pursue creating my first true vbhack...

if I were to venture into that. what resources are there?

Well it depends what you mean by resources. I'm sure if you created such a hack it would generate a lot of interest and so if you got stuck anywhere our friendly hackers will help out :)

- miSt

Mine is kind of like heatware I supposed, you can find more at this thread:

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthrea...threadid=51888

Resources:
PHP: www.php.net // PHP's manual: www.php.net/manual/
MySQL: www.mysql.com

And just read through vB's files to get a better idea of what's going on. Also take a look at the database and take in everything from there :).