vBulletin dates and times

[av8or1]

Hi-

I am doing some testing for a script-based utility to add a post to a forum. One of the things I wanted to test first was this TIMENOW constant. And I am running into an error. First the simple program:

<?php
error_reporting(E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE);
chdir('/home2/russiaq5/public_html/forum');
define('VB_AREA', 'External');
require_once('./global.php');
require_once('./includes/init.php');
require_once('./includes/class_dm.php');
require_once('./includes/class_dm_user.php');
print "tn=>" . TIMENOW . "\n";
?>

And the error:

X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.17
Content-type: text/html

<br />
<b>Fatal error</b>: Call to undefined method stdClass::set() in <b>/home2/russiaq5/public_html/forum/includes/functions.php</b> on line <b>7320</b><br />

I did a search, which mentioned the notion of corrupted PHP files, so I replaced all of them from my vB member download but the error persists. Anyone have any ideas?

Also, how does vB store dates and times when not strings in a table? For example, I noticed a value of 1303184037 for the joindate for a user. I did some math on this number but couldn't come up with anything that made any sense. Anyone know?

UPDATE: I did the calculation wrong. These dates are PHP/Unix dates, which are the number of seconds since January 1, 1970. Sorry for posting this question when I simply pressed the wrong button on my calc.

Thank you in advance!

Jerry