[DONE] Paid hacks versus free hacks
 

Can somebody reiterate vB.org's policy on releasing pay-only hacks? :)

Not allowed.

Okay, thanks. :)

thank god. if someone wants to advertise/sell their hacks they can use hotscripts :p

technically, the way i see it is hacks aren't really free, since you do have to own a vb .. free would mean people that didn't own a vb ;)

:)

whenever you see such a hack where you have to pay for, you know the use of the report button ;)

Would it be possible to why it's not allowed?

(Not that I want to sell anything but I am confused by the matter)

well we are the halfofficial hacking site of vbulletin.
we're on jelsofts servers and getting the support from them to see who's licensed and so on.

as an result of this, we provide help to all licensed user, and are not a platform for advertising anything, and paid hack belong to that category.

When we start allowing paid hacks, the free hacks will probably cease to exist, I'm afraid. Whether it be in another separate forum or not. As soon as one member who write a hack sees that others are getting paid for theirs, most of us are going to have to start writing our own hacks if we want them. I for one will NEVER buy a hack from anyone. Paid hacks take all of the fun out of learning vBulletin hacking. And the sad thing is, a lot of the hack writers that are in favor of selling their hacks, learned most of their hacking right here at vb.org for free. Learn for free but make others pay? Not my idea of a "community".

That's exactly how i feel :)

- miSt

I don't believe that is true. What typically happens when somebody releases a paid hack is that somebody else rushes to create a very similar hack for free because they want the popularity.

Coding is a skill that deserves to be rewarded. Webmasters have a few choices when it comes to creating a site. They can do all the work themself and use their own ideas and coding abilities. Or they can depend on others to do it for them. When depending on somebody else to come up with ideas or code, then there has to be something in it for the coder or the coder isn't going to want to do it.

In an ideal world, we would share our knowledge and create great sites. Mist would write hacks that I might use, and perhaps Mist would use hacks that I write. (as an example) The problem comes in sites like this when a majority of the users do not contribute to the community but only take. That alone wouldn't be bad if they knew what they were doing when they took hacks.

However, most support questions hackers see once a hack comes out of beta are not bugs. Instead, they are feature addition requests or problems where the user didn't follow directions and installed things incorrectly and then needs help. So, what is in it for the hack writer then? In some cases, it's an ego thing. Bane has a hack that many people use and he can point to that hack with pride.

But some of us are niche programmers. We do little mods that help out specific requests or we write little things that once added to a board have no credit for the hack author. We don't demand our name be left on boards, and we don't have temper tantrums when people remove our tag lines from things we do.

There is a definite place for paid hacks for people who need extremely custom work that they do not know how to do themself. For example, on my board when somebody registers, a script checks to see if the member writes for Epinions.com. If he does, he is put in one usergroup. If he doesn't, he's put in another. Nobody else in the world would probably want that script and if I couldn't write it myself I should be willing to pay to have it done.

To me, it would seem that Jelsoft would want a comprehensive directory of services available to people who buy vbulletin. While I can understand them not wanting people advertising competing installation services, I wouldn't think they would get upset about a sig line that discretely announces that the member is willing to do custom work.

Amy