[kh99]

Well, I don't know anything about vb5 and I don't work for the company, so I can only speculate. But as others have pointed out there doesn't seem to be any advantage to intentionally screwing over developers who are adding value for free. And the security issue might have been a reason someone came up with, but it doesn't seem like something that would be the main reason. If I had to guess I'd go with the simplest and most obvious reason (to me, anyway): they just wanted to be able to develop vb5 without the constraint of keeping a plugin system working. I mean, if you started out with the idea that you were going to have hooks in the code, every time you changed or reorganized something you'd have to worry about whether the hooks still made sense, and how many mods you might be breaking.

The plugin system was a big hack anyway. I always thought what it needed was some kind of event-driven system, as in "call my function when someone writes a post", and I don't have to figure out where in the code that happens or what variables I need to use. Maybe vb5 currently works something like that, by extending classes, I don't know. But another possibility is that they just didn't think it was a good system for adding mods.