To enforce a valid coding style in the community!

[Revan]

I offer my services as a member of the verification team as well. You remember from the Hack Manual Gen thread that I'm a perfectionist, so I would be one of those 4 or 5 I strive to achieve the standards in terms of coding style, but also actual coding (such as escaping DB values the vB way), templates, phrasing, etc
[/advertising to blag his way into the team]

I would applaud such a change, phpBB does it and it works for them, so why shouldn't it work for us?
Coupled with the Hack Database, this would IMO definetely be a huge step towards a better vBulletin coding community as a whole.

The sceptics might say "we can't force people to code a certain way", and while this is true, I fail to see why us hack installers should be forced to either clean up the code, or slowly watch our vBulletin installation buckle from poorly written hacks just because we desire/require the functionality it provides.
The vBulletin Coding Standards not only produce clean, easy to read/customise coding, it makes debugging easier. Imagine a script where an entire foreach() iteration is written on a single line, cramped together, then a parse error occurs. The line # would be the same, yet users (without syntax highlighting editors) would have to break up the line in order to pinpoint the error.
I fail to see a single good reason why these coding standards should continue being as undervalued as they are.

EDIT:

Originally Posted by Brad

BTW we can't enforce people to code to standard anyway. Take a look at some of the 'experanced' coder's early hacks and you'll see what I mean, everyones ability to code develops over time with the help of others. Enforcing people to code to standard would deny people that option.

I disagree.
First of all, the vBulletin Coding Standards are mainly about code formatting. The ability to proper indent code, writing clean code, etc has nothing to do with someone's ability to code. I'm not saying we should get a bunch of Coding Nazis to fine coam each hack making sure they spaced their function arguments properly OR ELSE!!!, but there's a difference between that and some of the manure that Ive seen when looking at hacks.

Oh and just because you tried it before, doesn't mean you don't have new talent to help carry this out NOW. The hack database, as I understand it, was present before. Why not bring back this QA team, at least for a trial run?
The worst thing that can happen is the team being so totally backlogged that they have to give up, at which point the admins can simply disband the team and disable the Moderation (or whatever youll use to delay hack releases), and all is well