In IP.Board 2.x, on the page where we manage our skin templates, you could easily tell which skin group had one or more modified skin templates in it as the little icon beside it would be red. This functionality was removed in 3.x. I found this to be helpful for a number of reasons, and would like to see it return.
First, if an upgrade to the forum software modifies some skin templates, the upgrade script won't touch your modified skin template groups, and you'll have to patch those manually. When we look at a difference report, we used to be able to quickly see whether or not any of the templates changed in this new version needed this manual patching; if you could see that only 3 of your skin's template groups had been modified it made the job of patching a whole lot quicker. Secondly, it can be kind of an annoyance on a development board where you do things like test out code snippets. Again, when you upgrade that board, any modified templates you had won't get updated, so you may run into issues where you just fiddled with a bit of code, forgot to revert it, and now you have some code for the page that is out of whack.
As was pointed out we don't think they're directly copying us :) I'm sure they are reacting to IPB3 but that is just common business sense to do so.
Of course vB's people (some more than others) will, after vB4, declare that they invented everything and we copied them :lol: but again that's just the nature of the world.
