not a hack request per say. but an idea. IE vbulletin developers please read this..

[Dominick]

driving to work today I was thinking bout this... saml will work in theory but wsdl I am iffy on.

So the question was posed. How do you share the thread table across the internet without opening the dbase to remote requests...

here is my solutions
xml
finger

2 forums in this example

forum a
forum b

forum a shares forum "foo" with forum b
user on forum b signs on to the foo forum
forum b send a finger (modified for this purpose) to forum a. forum a checks the thread table for any modified data since the last finger from forum b. forum a compiles new thread information into an xml datagram with the needed information back to forum b. The data is pushed to forum b.

add to that frequent replication using smtp and you have a winnner