Hello..some questions before buying

[LancelotGr]

Ok my questions are:

If i use any of the "hacks", is this legal? I mean its allowed from the Vbulletin team or its not and therefore i will loose my support?

If i pay for the Owned LIcense, which i found it very cheap, i will not have to pay again every year?

How easy is to install the hacks? I tried to go in one of the hacks forums to see whats going on but it didnt let me as i havent bought the program. Is any other place where i can see some hacks?

If we have some ideas of things that we want to create in our forums..can we say these ideas to the vbulletin team and ask them for their help?
This help will be paid?

If we try to make some private forums, how they appear?
I mean can we have forums that are for some members and in others account will not appear and others that will be with a password?

Thats the most of the questions i have right now..sorry if many of them are very silly but i tried to cover all the questions that my members will ask me
Thanks a lot...

[Admin]

Hacks are legal, but you will not get any support from Jelsoft.

With an owned license you mustn't pay every year to run the forum, but you need to pay $30/year if you want more upgrades.

Depends on the hack, but usually it's as simple as copying and pasting code.

Jelsoft will not help you code features for vBulletin, but you can throw the idea here in the Requests forum and hackers from this community will help you as much as they can.

Yes that's possible, using Access Masks. You can control every user's access to every forum, resulting in lots and lots of power. You can also place the users in different usergroups and manage access per usergroups.

HTH.

[LancelotGr]

Thanks a lot for your quick reply.
You informed me for everything i asked...so maybe i am your future customer
One more question though.
You said that " With an owned license you mustn't pay every year to run the forum, but you need to pay $30/year if you want more upgrades. ".
With the term upgrade, u mean only going from version 2.2.6 to version 2.2.7?
Can i pay only once the company have upgrades or its sure that every year we have upgrades?

Thanks again mate...

Ps:
So if i install any new hacks, i will not have any future support to my forum from the company or i will not have support especially to the areas of Hack?

[Sparkz]

I am not affiliated with vBulletin other than as a regular customer, but I'll have a crack at your questions.

I am sure there are plenty of people that will correct me if I say something wrong.

Originally posted by LancelotGr
[B]Ok my questions are:

If i use any of the "hacks", is this legal? I mean its allowed from the Vbulletin team or its not and therefore i will loose my support?

Yes, it is legal. Support for hacks is usually found here, and a fair few of the vBulletin developers also frequent this forum.

If i pay for the Owned LIcense, which i found it very cheap, i will not have to pay again every year?

No, the owned lisence lets you run vBulleting indefinately. However, you will have to pay an additional $30 for continued access to the members area at vbulletin.com, where you can download upgrades.

How easy is to install the hacks? I tried to go in one of the hacks forums to see whats going on but it didnt let me as i havent bought the program. Is any other place where i can see some hacks?

The difficulty involved in installing a hack depends very much on the nature and complexity of the hack, as well as your own knowledge of PHP/MySQL/vBulletin.

If we have some ideas of things that we want to create in our forums..can we say these ideas to the vbulletin team and ask them for their help?
This help will be paid?

I would think the vB-team has more than enough work already.
But at this site there is a request forum, and a hack database. If you want some added functionality, try using the search features here and see if someone has already made it. If you can't find it, post a request and someone might just make it for you - maybe even for free.

If we try to make some private forums, how they appear?
I mean can we have forums that are for some members and in others account will not appear and others that will be with a password?

vBulletin has a very powerfull system for administrating who can see what forums. I will not try to explain this here, but it should not be a problem to accomplish anything you want. The current version does not support password protecting forums other thru the user-login.
You can give access to private forums to whole usergroups, or to one and one user with access masks.

[LancelotGr]

With my last question..in the PS i mean:

If the hacks are legal, so ok if i mess with a hack, i dont get support officially from the company but this means that for the future i will not have any more support in general?(Perhaps something else maybe get an error in the future)
Or i will lose the support of the Hack area?
The support is very usefull and when you buy something is very critical.
If by installing some hacks i loose it...its very bad.

Thats all
I hope i didnt confused you

[Sparkz]

Bah! Theres what I get from surfing over GPRS... There was no other replies when I wrote my first post :P

[Admin]

Theoretically you lose all support, but if the problem is a server issue that happens with a new install of vBulletin as well, you will get support.