[dan_p]

Problem:

We have a section of our forum for classifieds. Basically people can post a thread offering an item for sale. One of our rules states that people are not allowed to "bump" threads more than once every 72 hours which we currently enforce by trashing people's threads if they violate the rule. This obviously adds a lot of moderator overhead. For the record, only thread owners may reply to their threads, other people can not.

Proposal:

A plugin that allows me to say "Within forums X, Y and if the last reply was within the last 72 hours, do not allow a reply to be posted."

The net effect of this should ultimately be the same as if the person did not have permission to reply to the thread (hide/disable the post reply button and forcibly stop form from being loaded/submitted.)

Solution?:

I don't know. I am very fluent in PHP/SQL and I have no doubts about my ability to program this logic into place, I just have absolutely 0 experience with vBulletin's plugin/hook system.

So what say you community? Is this possible? If it's possible what is my plan of attack?

I figure there has to be a hook that allows me to short-circity a user's ability to post a reply to a thread.

Thanks in advance!