Adding Grease to vBulletin

Any power user of vBulletin knows that it’s one of the best forum scripts out there – and the best forums tend to use it too.

However once you start using it alot even vBulletin comes up short.

Take the search feature. To prevent server overloading the search is (with a few exceptions) a POST form with hidden security fields and sometimes captcha. Now that’s fine for people who search occassionally but if you have a search that repeat several times a day then it would be great to be able to save a search as a link that can be put into favourites.

Then there’s the moderator features like closing a thread. It’s not hard, just a few clicks once the page has loaded… but when you close a huge number of threads everyday then those few clicks can be annoying and wrist wearying.

So, in comes GreaseMonkey. I heard about it ages ago and didn’t see a use for it at the time but I’ve recently rediscovered it and am using it to help me customise vBulletin my way.

For instance on the search page I have little bits of javascript that setup a variety of searches just the way I want them. It not only prompts me to make my standard searches and not forget any – but it also sets them up just the way I want them.

On the forum display page I have a button that will close an entire page of threads  in one go – missing out those that are already closed.

And on the thread display page I have a button to quickly close the thread.

Add Informenter and SnapLinks (firefox extensions) to the mix and the 3 extensions make for a powerful enhancement to vBulletin.