I'm sorry, but we were being threatened with legal action. An agreement was reached among the staff (this includes Emeralda btw) and plans were made among all of us on how to handle it. The job of notifying you about these plans was left to Emeralda. Quite frankly it didn't occur to any of us at the time that vBulletin would be some sort of "holy relic" that couldn't be touched under any circumstances. It is quite frankly absurd to me that the forum software is the defining factor of any community.
On the financial side of things, which no one except for the ones who have to pay seem to care about. We would have had to shell out $600 this month to keep vBulletin and keep the servers running. The idea of coaxing donations from members was never an option in the agreement. We had licenses for IPB and Xenforo and since aproximately 50% of the member database knew xenforo we considered that the best option. According to forumreviewer, forum administrator, and experts on community development, xenforo is just as good as vBulletin and "most members who go from vBulletin to xenforo will, after an adjustment period, find it to be a highly user friendly," "90% of users who switched from vBulletin to xenforo liked the new software better after a month of using it".
We never had any desire to morally force members to donate under the false pretence that "the forum will be gone if you don't", because that simply wasn't true.
The reasons for the seperation is directly linked to the fact that Emeralda directly went against agreements we had all come to, and she expressed agreement with, in conversations. It was obvious throughout this process that agreeing on things in the future, when things would inevitably get more complicated, would be impossible.
We will gladly hear the members opinions on anything, but in this case there were legal and financial implications that had to be taken into consideration.