Btw @
Tempest, I am also not aware of the main reason behind the moving out from vB and only know latter about the obstacle.
If we to follow your "polling" advice (for donation), I can guaranty you that we will not be moving away from vB.
Then here is the full story for you and everyone else.
The vB installation was illegal. Due to this we've always been at risk of losing everything (servers, site, forums, the lot). Recently we recieved a cease and decist notice from Vbulletin. A demand we dealyed for as long as possible, until we were forced to follow their instructions to avoid any legal action against Alan or the server owner (Boyd).We had been looking to legitimize the forum software anyway, we were simply rushed by this notice.
Since we already had IPB and Xenforo licenses it was decided that the most logical action would be to convert the forum into one of those. Since Eduardo already knew xenforo's coding system, has coded mods for it, the software itself runs better on the server, is considered faster, and a large ammount of the member base was already comfortable with xenforo it seemed like a no brainer to go for the xenforo system.
We already pay a monthly fee of over $300 USD for the servers, over $160 USD of which are directly connected to the server the forum runs on. As such we saw no financial logic what so ever in spending over $200 USD for a vBulletin license. Certainly not a vBulletin 4.0 license when there was never any intent or desire to upgrade from 3.8.7 to vB 4.0 to begin with. I personally can not see the logic in paying over $200 USD for a software that is considered by its creators outdated and is entirely unsupported by vBulletin themselves.
Further the financial benefits of the forum, which is next to nill, does not in any way justify an extra expenditure of $200 USD from our side. That's not speaking ill of the forum and its members, it's simply a numerical fact. There is
nothing to justify this expense.