Improving quality of submitted hacks (code)

[VonDoom]

I personally believe most vB hacks found here on vB.org are pretty solid. probably the biggest reason i switched from IPB to vB. lol even IPB's official hacks do not work as advertised. Granted i cant comment on the effects of hacks on big boards. but for the most part im extremly pleased with what i consider the best system for hacks and feedback in the entire forum realm.. Hats off to vB.org the system may not be perfect but it is the best out there ...

[Regs]

There are too many modifications released or updated each month to inspect them all

Again to be clear, I'm not suggesting EVERY mod released.

I suggested as a starting point, give modifications that win MOTM a review. It's an ADDITIONAL reward to the coder.

How is that NOT educational to the coder?

Coders do not need to follow a standard in order to release something, I'm not suggesting that at all.

Basically, a team here would review one modification a month. Anyone who is coding modifications here could benefit by the suggestions a team gave to a winning modification.

[Zachery]

If someone here says a mod is good by some review, then a security issue is noted...


Review by third party needs to be done by a real third party. If you're interested in picking up the tab for every piece of code submitted, I'm sure vBulletin.org could find a way.


I would rather see this time and effort spent on furthering education of the public here and putting more focus on quality coding standards and security practices. Rather than having some random arbitrary team take all their time to review the code here.

[Regs]

You are correct, it is obviously a waste of time.

Cheers,

Regs.

[CarlitoBrigante]

What's important, in my opinion, is also that forum owners should take the time to check the stuff they are installing in their forums, if they have the knowledge. The first issue with mods is security, of course, but once a security issue is reported, the mod is taken down if the author does not update it.

The issues that are more difficult to debug and find out if you are not good at programming or you do not have a popular forum (yet), are performance related. In general, if you have a popular forum with dozens of users active at any time, or with a great number of posts, you should be checking the code and effect on performance of every single add-on you install.

I have seen a lot of clients with slow forums that could not understand what was going on, just to find out that the problem was terrible queries (very, very common) or bad coding practices (like loops with single queries in each loop that could instead be all grouped in a single query) in one of the installed add-ons. Sometimes, these add-ons had been installed when the forum was just starting, so effect on performance was unnoticeable but became an issue as the forums grew in popularity.

One should respect the amount of work people put in these modifications and that make vb.org so great, but you should also take responsibility for what you put on your forums.

[RS_Jelle]

Forcing code standards would be a bad thing indeed

An idea I have been playing with for a while: creating default images which coders could add to their threads, indicating the mod follows specific code standards, but maybe not all (free to choose which).

A bit like the W3C icons:

Everyone can add them to their sites, but they give absolutely no guarantee.

We could create buttons like:

• Valid XHTML
• Fully templated
• Fully phrased
• vB input cleaner used
• Includes hook locations (for big mods)
• Accessibility: session url's, RTL support (left-right style variables), ...
• Admin help included
• ...

And this doesn't require any regulation from vB.org staff (only hosting the images would be nice)

Like the W3C does with the WAI guidelines, we could also create conformance levels. If your mod matches a specific group of standards, you can use the "Level 1-2-3-..." button.