The *must be done* hacks thread list

[Brad]

Originally Posted by cheat-master30

Images? I can get those in about a day or two, since at my own forum, I have like 10 moods suggested daily by members and had to actually stop accepting smilies because I couldn't cope with the amount.

Hint: Ask at most gaming forums or the like, or maybe a site like the Spriter's Resource, and you can often use them with credit to the author.

Are they making such images from scratch or grabbing them off some website? If they are in fact doing it themselves do they create images when they feel like it or do they work with other people?

Most people like that (read: usually kids/young adults) may be skilled but more often then not they are horrible people to work with. I can't even begin to remember how many "image designers" I've gone through over the years. Most of them get very excited about a project, claim they'll stick with it then two weeks later are no where to be found or have an excuse for why something hasn't been completed yet.

It's just too hard to get people to work on a time table for free and considering most designers think a "skin" with a handful of custom images (and no xhtml modifications) is worth $500 = $1,000... well it's no wonder why people like me don't deal with them anymore and just end up struggling to learn photoshop for themselves.

Probably because apart from that, vBulletin offers the best features.

Let me fix that for you;

"Probably because apart from that, vBulletin offers the best features for me."

vBulletin is not right for everyone. There are plenty of forums on the net that would be just as popular if the discussion(s) were conducted via a mailing list or old school BBS. I'd bet $200 that less than 1% of the message boards on the internet need/require a "battle system" and out of that 1% most of them are probably looking for something customized for their own forum. This is why you don't see too many people jumping at the chance to write such a hack, the number of programmers interested in such a project is small and the target audience is small.

Now if we could write "RPGs" for the web that worked like WoW or Starcraft it might be a different story. But until that time comes most people are simply not interested.

Another thing before I wrap this up: Myspace has recently added a bunch of web based games to their site and from what I can see they are catching on over there. Most of them are just the same game with a unique name and different items and it all looks like it would be simple to replicate. However what you can never replicate is the user base at myspace.com. Basically what I'm getting at here is people interested in such games are already playing them elsewhere...so what good does an identical application hosted on thousands of vBulletin forums really do? Are people willing to sign up at "somelamesite.com" because you have an RPG game? Are your existing members really interested in such an application or is your time better spent improving your content and participating in discussions on your forum? For most forums it ain't worth the effort and the "Battle arena" ends up begin a not-often used feature that must be debugged every time you update vBulletin.