[Merlin_]

While thinking about the many hacks that add columns to crucial base tables, such as post, it seemed that is not the best idea. Modifying a vBulletin base table could cause problems with upgrades later, or cause corruption, or have unintended side-effects when other hacks add or remove data from them.

It seems that a better way to add data to post, for instance, would be to add a table that holds the new columns. You could just add code that then queries, or adds to, that table using the postid from vBulletin, or modify a query to use a join to bring in the additional data. Like this, perhaps:

select ... from post 
inner join hack_post on post.postid = hack_post.postid...