[ndoktoruser]

Originally Posted by Replicant

If something in the mod or uninstall script were to go awry, the anonymous posts would be irreversible

If we start from the point that posts written anonymously would never have been written, once the users didn't have this feature, it would be OK having those posts as "guest user". Plus the fact that it would be inconvenient to the users initially having something personal or awkward posted as anonymous, then having their identities shown.

Once we, the moderators, have their identities saved in a special table to avoid eventual problems, I would be fine with that.

Originally Posted by Replicant

I still think it's a bad idea to modify the node table directly.

Yes. I don't know what issues those changes might cause, but I did a small test and couldn't detect any problem.

Originally Posted by Replicant

Also the future vbulletin upgrade scripts are not going to take the changes into account and could cause issues there as well.

I agree with you.
To perform any update, one would need to uninstall the plugin (and undo changes to the hook), then update vB and install the plugin adapted for the new version.
I foresee hard time testing the feature, but I don't see another way to avoid multiple hacks (for the post counter, for the topic creator, for the last poster in the topic, for the user information in the topic itself, for the search and maybe more).

So, we have two options: change the data vB stores in the table node or multiple hacks to override fetchUserInfo.