[bcrdukes]

I was faced with a very similar situation last year. I own and operate a private vBulletin-based forum for my close friends. The traffic isn't very high anymore as many of us have other priorities, but we all agreed to keep the forum alive. A string of events lead to us having to upgrade the old vBulletin forum for a variety of reasons.

First, the host we were using stopped supporting the version of MySQL, so the forum was bricked, much like the errors some of you experienced the other day. Second, the PHP version became unsupported, adding more salt to the wound. In a panic, we had to find a new web host and upgrade to the new version of vBulletin, at a very high cost. The upgrade came with some of its own headaches, but we managed to sort it out. However, the overall look, feel, and user environment was not the same, and I feel that pushed people to visit the forum less and less. Had I known about the Xenforo forum software, I would have gone that route. It was created by the original team who started vBulletin.

In the end, it's a lot of work to manage an online community, especially a forum of this nature. I genuinely hope the forum stays alive as it has been a very meaningful part of my life and I am thankful to everyone who has posted on the forums over the past 20+ years.