[Sparkz]

It does not matter how it is hidden.

First of all, it would take a skilled hacker a minimum of time to remove something like this since we're talking about a product that is delivered with full sources - and even if it wasn't, it would not make it to much harder to remove.

Second of all, upon noticing that it does excessive callbacks, etc, you would get a lot of pissed users and negative publicity - not that I think (hope) Jelsoft would do such a thing, but using callbacks in all parts of the script would produce some really interesting possibilities with regards to monitoring the users.

Third; Users on slow connections, or with bad pingtimes to the jelsoft server would suffer from this. It would affect pageload and whatnot. Users wanting a closed community on an intranet would be forced to chose a different product alltogheter in some cases (servers being completely inaccessible from the outside world, etc)

Doing something like this would be the sure way to kill of vBulletin, in my opinion.