[TigerC10]

That article is from 2006, are you sure that's how they're still calling the function?

What about sticking $_POST in there instead of 'p' ??

Have you tried addslashes? That's the function that replaced magic_quotes.


The other thing that article talks about is that you retrieve the value like so:

$vbulletin->GPC['value']

So your call should be this:

$vbulletin->input->clean_gpc('p', 'venue', TYPE_STR);
$venue = htmlspecialchars($vbulletin->GPC['venue']);

EDIT:
Yeah, I think I had it wrong at first, I misunderstood the API. The code sample above should be appropriate.