[DaFace]

Originally Posted by dmahurin

Just looked into it a bit out of curiosity, has anyone looked into "vanilla" or "flarum" as an alternative to vbulletin? They are both free and open source, are more modern builds that can handle updated mySQL versions, and in the case of Vanilla, has an import tool already built that could bring everything over pretty easily. Without seeing the current db and code I can't say for sure, but it might be worth playing around with on the downtime server to see if feasible. If it works out, could convert the main planet site over and there would be a full backup on downtime from testing. Bring over all the user and role info, basic forum and sub forum structures, possibly even the existing posts if wanted. Might make sense to start fresh on the new one and leave the "historical" posts on downtime.

The software is a minimal cost compared to the hosting.