It seems that the latest versions of vbulletin are very broken in PHP 5.4 even though they state that “vBulletin 4.x requires PHP 5.2.0 or greater and MySQL 4.1.0 or greater”
Most of the problems are from E_STRICT which is part of E_ALL in PHP 5.4, but vBulletin and Internet Brands (who own vBulletin) seem very slow to fix these problems. They even denied that it was a problem with vBulletin when I originally reported some of the errors in June 2012 stating “Closing this issue because it appears to be unrelated to vBulletin code.”
They have since reopened the issue and it has been rolled up in a PHP 5.4 check task, but seems quite slow being that PHP 5.4 was released nearly a year ago and PHP 5.5 is due out soon.
So to get vBulletin working without errors on my sites I have to modify and fix all of these problems. I wish I could contribute back to vBulletin or to its users so that this effort is not duplicated, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to do it (hosting files on here would violate copyright).
I’d love to chat to you about what you did and if it was just the E_STRICT (and similar) errors being displayed as I have just run into this problem after upgrading PHP.
My big one at the moment seems to be that notification emails (new PM’s, new threads, subscribed thread) are coming in late (read 48 hours+ late) or not at all. Yet strangely emails for new registrations seem to be working perfectly and sending instantly.
Posting the entire files might violate copyright, but posting the diffs of the changes you made should fall under fair use.