[Christine]

When I started posting here right after Chen opened the site, I spent hours upon hours pouring over the Help Me Finish forum. I learned so much about working with vBulletin that I can't even say. Remember the days before template conditionals?

I am not saying things should go 'back' per se -- as noted, back in the day, we were all hunting through thousands of lines of code to find that elusive undocumented function call we needed to write hack X. Good grief, I wrote a persistent Mark Forum Read for v3 that was 18 pages of instructions when printed -- 14 php files had to be hacked. LOL!!

Why didn't I release it here? Well, because of life and work, I didn't want to support the repeated questions by people who couldn't be bothered to read the well documented information -- or the thread itself.

So -- you can count me in as being part of the problem. Rather than dealing with it (and mostly a lack of time), I have only released things that are so plug-n-play that no one even needs to think to load them up.

I credit this as part of the problem you are mentioning, and no one to blame but myself. If I had more time and patience -- I would love to go back to the collaborative efforts of the Help Me Finish forums.

That said, with the software evolving as much as it has today -- most of the core hacks are already accomodated in the core release. What I end up doing is basically modifying things that are so unique to my own needs that I don't release them as most wouldn't find meaning in stuff like adding the sort on userid to the approve members list or adding the sort on usergroupid to the PM stats review.

Sorry this is so long -- just wanted to note that I know where you are coming from. I cut my teeth here back then as well. I also know that with the evolution of the software -- things change, needs change, and while my board is highly hacked -- it isn't the same kind of major functionality, team effort required stuff like back then when we didn't even have a workable PM system.

Originally Posted by Reeve of shinra

phpbb or ubb would release some mod or include some feature that vbulletin didn't have and being the proud types that we are - we rolled our own and tried to "one up" them in the process. It was competitive fun.

edit: that reminds me of another thing. Requests were more simplistic in the vb2 days. Karma was just an integer that was incremented or decreased by a button... today, people are expecting someone to replicate myspace for free. Thats an educational issue and we should do a better job of establishing expectations.

^^ Agreed...