[Wayne Luke]

Originally Posted by kall

How are we supposed to know whether or not a plugin that modifies the database will inadvertently add a column/table that is added in a future version of vBulletin?

A good practice would be to prefix your added fields with a unique identifier.

Say your hack or plugin is called Foxchat for instance and you need to add 3 fields to the user table for it to work... They should be called:

foxchat_field1, foxchat_field2, foxchat_field3.

This would ensure that your field doesn't interfere with future fields. If a standard vBulletin field is implemented to do what you want, it would be your determinatation to migrate to that field and provide an import sequence for it. The same practice can be followed for adding tables.