Regarding profile field assignments, I'm still a big supporter of having the hacks use independently assignable profile field locations. It's just a simple matter of modifying the way profiles are written to, like I did with the Karma hack. This way, the people installing the hacks can assign whatever free fields they have, and thus prevent the profiles from becoming 50 lines long just because someone installed a hack that uses field 49, but didn't install any of the others. Or, better yet, you could have all the hacks read off of a template member file that contained the field definitions for all the profile fields currently used on a particular board. When a hack was installed, it would read that file, find the first free field, and then write to the template and claim it. If Infopop decided to use more profile fields, an upgrade script could be written to use the template file to convert all the member files to the new format and then update the template accordingly. I would be more than happy to work with some other knowledgable members of the UBB hacking community (and Infopop) to write some library files for using a template system such as this, as I really think it would make things a lot easier for people across the board.
