[BunkTek]

I can see the use for such a hack in a very legitimate board. Take a board dedicated to say employees. You want people to see what is being posted, but you also want to know who reads so you can eliminate the users you know from the ones you don't to see which ones may be the employer. The Dell employee web site is one example.

The site I help admin uses a EULA on a web page. Its a pretty standard EULA, but some aspects are fairly unenforceable in court. It is of enough concern that I'm scraping up $600 to have it rewritten by a contract attorney so that we can keep certain people out.

I'd never use a hack like this, although I may have considered it a couple of months ago. Instead I spent a couple of months playing with permissions, reorganizing the forums, creating new user groups, editing the registration emails. editing the registration text, creating a web page with the EULA on it and requiring you to click "I AGREE", setting up a popup EULA once you hit the actual forum, editing the guest welcome message, changing the name of index.php and creating redirects, etc, etc.

Sometimes the post and member numbers is not the main issue. For our boards it is the content and being able to keep our members informed of what is going on. Target audience is about 1000 to 2000 people total.

I've learned more about php, html and vbulletin that I ever wanted or needed to, just to protect my members from certain people.

To say that vbulletin could be held responsible for the content on a warez site is like holding GM and Jonny Walker responsible for me killing someone while driving drunk. It just doesn't work that way.

EULAs and any other contract have a severability clause in them to make sure that if any protion of the contract is deemed unenforceable or otherwise contrary to law the rest of the contract doesn't get thrown out as well. You can say that people who use your product must die their hair dayglo purple, but it wouldn't hold up in court. Look at the lawsuit against CompUSA and Symantec last year, people challenged the policy that once you opened the shrinkwrap you could not return the software. The court decided that since you had to open the software to view the software license the store and the company had to accept any returns if you simply said I don't agree to the software agreement. The only other option was to put the software agreement on the box somewhere, kind of hard when most of these run for pages.