[akanevsky]

What does "QA" stand for? Quality Assurance?.. I dislike the abbreviation.

It discourages beginner hackers from releasing hacks.

I disagree:

• The vBulletin coding standards are publically available through the official vBulletin manual and are easy to learn. These standards are basically about proper indentation and proper line breaks. Therefore, they take very little time to learn - to me, it took about 10 minutes to read through the standards section and memorize it.
• Beginner hackers do not generally release long hacks. The QA Team, therefore, could easily fix the first few releases of that beginner, but not allow any more releases after a stated amount if the hacker refuses to comply with the standard.
• Usually, people hack because they like doing it. If they like doing it, they should be happy to learn how to do what they like more efficiently. If they don't want to learn it - they are not serious about coding and they should not be releasing hacks.

However, this is not likely to work out for the following reasons:

• Beginner-level hackers would probably pay no attention to the edits made by the QA team, making the QA's efforts pointless.
• Mass fixing of hacks by the QA Team would take too much time, which most of us don't really have.

It delays the release of hacks as presumably hacks won't show up until they are approved.

You are right - they won't show up until they are approved. However, this doesn't really matter. The time coders and end-users waste to solve installation problems that are occuring to unexperienced installation performers will be much longer than the time required to write a valid hack once and for all as well as the time required to install a valid hack without later problems.

Based on above + plus KirbyDE's post, I am rethinking the effectiveness of the above method... However, I'd like to propose another plan, which I am sure can act as a compromisse between the two sides:

On vBulletin.org, hacks have many custom fields ("Installer Included", "Support Provided", etc). It should be no problem for the forum administrators to add a field "QA Verified", editable only by the QA team and the administrators. Once the field is created, make the board display only the Verified hacks by default, with an option to display a complete list of hacks (both verified and non-verified). The option should be visualized as a link in every forum, and it should create a session variable (not a cookie), that would keep the setting as is until the user leaves the forum. Once he\she comes back, it will once again set to only display Verified hacks.

This way, it will feel like that the Verified hacks are positioned above non-verified hacks. While the coding style will not be enforced, vB hackers will be encouraged to code properly in order to rate higher and display their hacks better. The best part is, this system is easy to implement (I could help making it), and it would not require immediate validation, which is a plus from the QA team's point of view.

Let's have a trial run of this sytem!