See hacks are good if competitors do not have similar features. However with Jelsoft's vBulletin (
www.vbulletin.com) you have this pretty impressive piece of forum software that has all the features we UBB users have been dying for for about a year and more, standard.
I know I hacked the living daylights out of 5.47e to get these standard features just because IP was having probs with 6.x performance.
vBulletin requires zero hacks for Avatars, Calendars, Memberlist, User Polls, Custom titles, Topic Rating, PM, Topic Views, Attachments, Uploading Avatars, fast searching, good forum permission security setup (groups), and a host of other features. All of this comes standard out of the box.
What's neat is that with vBulletin all their extra features can be disabled via the Admin panel so it does not appear Bloatware once you finish editing the templates which means you are not hacking at all.
IMHO even the new features IP has finally got around to releasing like user Polls has a weird interface. What are they doing?
I think IP has to figure out where the money is and catch up with these common features.
I really don't think Hacking is the solution for all these features I mention above. I mean I respect the programming capabilities of everyone who releases hacks, but it's surprising that IP cannot release them as standard features themselves.
Why use a hack when the competitors have a neat package that does it all? You worry about security issues with hacks all the time, at least I did with 5.47e hacks, specially PM hack.
UBB Threads seems to be an option but it is too expensive fornow.
