[sahammondsr]

First, great hack, and thanks for sharing.

We have a reward site where points are an actual currency that can be converted to tangible goods so a hack like this made perfect sense for us.

We ended up dumping it and writing our own. The reason I'm contacting you is to offer to share the code we've written. Our hack is very specific to our system and wouldn't work to just give it to users (it would take some cleaning up and generalizing and removing our point inserts (into other database tables) etc, but we've added a couple of core features that I think would enhance your hack immeasurably.

First, we've put a short segment of php into the include template and then added a few lines to the postbit template and now we have the ability to assign points inline to the posts (save a click). This of course is a time saver and its fairly simple for any user to do. I'm uploading a screenshot with this post so you can understand what I am referring to. This also eliminates the edit to moderator.php and just sends the request straight to points.php which validates the request itself. The add points box you see in the screenshot below only appears to moderators (end users do not see this box).

Second, we've created a user on our system called PointFairy and when we add points we have the points.php automatically insert a post into the thread saying that points were added as well as update the pointfairy user's sig to show total points issued to date by the point fairy. You can see an example of this in action at http://forums.primarewards.com/forum....php?forumid=7. Most of the threads there have an automated "pointfairy" message appended to them. You'll notice it updates post/thread counts and the links as well (we didn't make it e-mail because our system triggers an e-mail when points are added anyway, but that wouldn't be a big change either).

Once we remove our own database inserts (just dealing with vBulletin field5 and inserting the post, etc.), we've got points.php down to around 40 lines of PHP (this doesn't account for the mass processing that's in the original).

Anyway, the point in contacting you is to offer to send our code to you if you want to generalize it, document it, and either merge it with yours or perhaps even use it instead of yours for your next release. If you're interested, contact me at ceo@primainternet.com. I clean it up and make it a hack and post it here myself, but I just don't have the time to come back and support it, so you're welcome to it if you'd like it.

Thanks for the inspiration.