Extending the forum manager options

[sarahk]

I work with a client who has a large vBulletin forum. A requirement has arisen to exclude some of those forums from external.php (RSS feed).

• The inelegant option is to just hack into external.php with the forum numbers;
• The elegant option is to extend either the forum permissions or the forum options (preferred);
• Or should I write a plugin with it's own management to select the forums that can be included in the RSS feed and write my own version of external.php (like the fps_external.php guy did)?

Is there a recommended way of doing this?