help needed with php7 issues on own mods

[mainframe]

Dear vBulletin.org community,

I made a few custom mods for my site many years ago and I'm trying to get them to work with php 7. They all work fine with the latest version of php 5.6 but when I use php 7 all places where I use the <vb:each stuff it is no longer working.

### TEMPLATE CODE ###

<vb:each from="topstats_bits" value="topstats_bit">
everything here is just blank, not showing and no errors whatsoever.
</vb:each>

### PHP CODE ###

$templater = vB_Template::Create('topstats_threads');
$templater->register('pagenumber', $pagenumber);
$templater->register('topstats_bits', $topstats_bits);

print_output($templater->render());

###

It's happening in all my custom mods where I use vb:each to list stuff.
Hope you guys can put the finger on this, been searching all day and can't find anything wrong.

Regards,
mainframe