Quote Originally Posted by SassyLady View Post
Thanks for the update Jim. I'm sure you'll choose the one that is best for everyone. I looked at all of them and pretty much any one of them will require some adjusting. You might get a few "Hey, what happened here?" PMs.

How soon before you change?
All up to us in how long - unless my host should eliminate earlier versions of PHP & MYSql, earlier than thought.

Just a matter of coming to a decision, forking up the pennies, the hard part in the upgrade process, then a LOT of work afterwards. Even if we were to stay with VB, all the work done over the years is lost & all the plugins and other things I purchased as additions, also all lost. So other than preserving the posts, which will happen no matter the choice, the rest will be from scratch.

The upgrade is always scary when it's larger levels as you don't want hiccups. Of course why backups are important! Plus, we may not be the busiest, but are well into 900,000 posts that need to be moved. Most is in the SQL database, which of course gets converted in the process. Whichever choice and platform, should put us back into another place where we'll be good to go with both services of php and sql for some time to come.

I'll try to make it smooth, and that usability isn't a whole lot different than now. Perhaps a few things in different places & maybe some even better new options.

And Fwiw - While vBulletin is still a leader and a force - the closest rival and some say even better is Xenforo. And that company was spurred by angry developers from vbulletin! So the folks writing the software should have a familiar feel behind things.