vBulletin 3 Hacks & Quality Assurance at vB.org

[Erwin]

With the RC1 release of vBulletin 3 coming closer, the Staff at vBulletin.org wishes to raise the standard of code in Hacks released here. vB3 Hacks will soon be allowed here, and it is of great importance to us that the quality of Hacks goes up a notch. In the past (with vB2-hacks), plenty of hacks have been released here on vBulletin.org containing security loopholes, unnecessary queries, and overall bad code.
To raise the standard of Hacks, we are thinking of implementing a system where experienced, skilled and well-respected vB Hackers are selected to review vB3 Hacks released here at vB.org. This will come in a two-level flavor - a basic review that will be made for every single hack that is released, and a far more in-depth review (upon request).
Especially the second (and far more thorough) level of the system will allow end-users to easily spot the more reliable Hacks on the site, as the second level approval means it is a secure, well-coded, well-optimized, easy to install and overall good quality hack.

This system will hopefully encourage hackers to raise the standards of their coding. Obviously this is voluntary - no one is forced to follow the recommendations of this review team. The basic review that is applied on all Hacks is mostly to make sure that beta-quality hacks don't get posted as full releases, and other such things.

The rating criteria are not set in stone already, we're making this announcement so that we know what YOU all are interested in and find important etc.
We already have some ideas in mind. However, we wish to have input from the members too. In particular, we want to get suggestions for the following:

a) Criteria used to rate
b) What points sytem to use
c) What rating scale to use


Give us as many of your thoughts as possible on this, and we, the Staff, will put our heads together. The more you people can come up with, the better. Who knows, we may just end up with some really nice system that everyone just loves! It all depends on how well you all can think up useful ideas.

We hope that this will improve our community and the quality of hacks released, which will be good for everyone in the end.


Keep in mind that this will be site-wide for vBulletin 3 Hacks only, not vB2-Hacks. This does not mean that you can no longer release vB2 hacks, this only means that the rating system will not apply to them.