Thank you for all the wonderful feedback everyone. You can still vote, but the direction seems clear. All of the votes are to leave, and the majority like vb4 the best, and I think it works for now and down the road.
- In order to upgrade to vb5, we have to go to vb4 first anyway.
In my testing this week of all the versions, I had some performance concerns with vb5, including receiving a "server is too busy, try again" message when I was the only one on.
vb4 appears to have more of the features we are used to than vb5, which appears to still be lacking some basic features.
vb4 is end of life, so by definition, there are security concerns, yet just last year, vb5 was exploited with the worst security flaw vb has ever had. They patched it, but those who weren't hacked were advised to close their boards entirely until a patch came out.
We can re-evaluate as we go and go to vb5 or change software entirely. A lot of vb4 boards went to Xenforo. Yes, our history can still be retained with different software. They supply an import tool.
So the plan as of now is to start early Friday morning. I will close .com for only an hour or two to re-download all the posts and threads so that we can be as current as possible. There is a chance this will fail, but we at least have what I already got. Once that is done, .com will be reopened while I work on the new site, but any posts made here then will not migrate.
I will post a new thread with the warning tomorrow, along with many of the steps I will be doing. I will edit that first post as Friday progresses so you can see where we are in the project.
Even though I already have an instance of vb4 installed, the post tables are not compatible for importing from here. So I will be updating the installation of vb3 at
https://www.patriotsplanet.net/BB and then upgrading that to vb4, which is the URL that the new Patriots Planet will live going forward.
As part of this the front page of patriotsplanet.net will be overhauled and useful. If you have bookmarks, I ask that when we are ready you repoint them to
https://www.patriotsplanet.net
If you are on mobile, try out the default mobile skin at
http://www.patriotsplanet.net/vb4 please. It is what we will have for mobile interface at the start, and its better than I thought.
Thank you again to all and please pray I don't screw this up too badly.