vb 3.8 upgrade to 5.1.7

[freaky]

I am re-visiting the possibility of upgrading my vb 3.8 forum with 10 million posts. There are a lot of complaints on the forums etc., I am only interested in learning where vb5 currently stands with 5.1.7, and IF it will work for ME. I already own both IPS and Xenforo licenses, BUT I have not moved my forums yet. I am giving vb5 one last fair shot, still trying to stick to VB

Here are a few things about my specific requirements.

I am not interested in the calendar.
I don't like adding too many mods or add ons to my site, I have a lot of template mods that are done based on user requests but thats really it.
Page load times are very important to me.
My site runs on paid subscriptions, paypal and auth.net are important to me.
My avatars and attachments are in the DB, I don't want them on local file systems as I run 5-8 webservers behind a load balancer.

So, what are some of the PROs and CONs as vb 5.1.7 sits right now? I understand there will never be a hooks system, so the modding community is not very happy about that. But is that really a deal breaker for a site that pretty much runs stock config?

What else I may be missing?

Thank you all for your feedback.

[Brad Padgett]

Firstly, congratulations on your 10 million post community, that's quite an achievement.

The advice I can offer you is several pros and cons. I wanted to add that page load times are not always as fast as what your used to on vb5 but for some there is not issue. I run a dedicated server and I have no issue with my forum. Though I do not have many users yet.

Several pros and cons you may want to consider are, there is a paid subscription option so you have that. The mods are hard to come by but template mods are usually very easy to obtain. You will more then likely find yourself with complaints on a forum that big, I just wanted to be honest. You may want to consider vbulletin 4. The reason I say this is because it will be a whole new user-experience. It's far different from vbulletin 3 and in my opinion is in the medium-level stage of development.

But as I say this, I also want to add that it's very possible you will be satisfied with what it has to offer. I am on vbulletin 5 and I believe it was a good decision even though my forum is very new.

One thing I've learned while on vbulletin 5 is what is most important for an active community with this type of software is the style that your using. A lot of people do not find the original style worth posting for as it is to be honest, very bland. I recommend Sultan Theme for their styles if you chose vb5.

I believe you will do well if you chose a proper style and design your site according to what fits in design and add your template mods in, then I see no problem with running the software and thoroughly agree that it will do well for your community.

Overall, the style is what makes the site with this one. The options are there. Numerous ones. And the amount of features are medium-level but there are plenty. Especially with JSON search modules, html and php modules, ad placement and the list goes on. It seems to be doing better more and more every day.

Good luck to you and I wish your forum great success in the many years to come.
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