[GraphicW]

I can fully understand someone wanting to get paid for their work, especially in the case of complex hacks. I am still against a directory of commercial hacks here. I am old school and when I first came onto the web in the early 90's, there were all kinds of free services and people were willing to help one another. Now these days, everybody and their dog is out to make a buck and you have to constantly build castles around your mailbox just to hold back the flood of spam. The same pattern is here, but without the spam. The activity level as far as hack development has slowed down, this site is not as helpful as it used to be and truth be told, I rarely ever find myself here. It used to be you could ask a question and you would have people jumping all over one another to get you an answer. You just don't see that anymore.

I know life is getting harder and finding new ways of earning money is sometimes a must, but just as it is hard for the hack developers, it is also getting hard for the prospective customers as well. Many people here do not run sites to make a profit, their goal is to provide the best community possible within their budget.

I find myself looking in the direction of PHPbb more and more these days as it seems the hack community at Vbulletin.org has been changing for the worst over the past two years. I struggle to find hacks with Vbulletin to allow me to accomplish what I want with my site (especially a good blog with the board). I have this problem even finding a paid script or hack to do some things I would like. I look at PHPbb hacks and I see ithese things (good blogs and etc) and they are almost always FREE!!!!!

I will quit rambling now. I hope that you can see where I am coming from here. The saying of, "Can't squeeze blood from a turnip" is coming to mind here. It just seems that a Vbulletin board these days is becoming a money pit when even a little increase in functionality can result in a $100 investment as well as another annual fee for access to updates.