Well vBulletin 3.5 has been out for a good amount of time and the hacks just keep coming in.
Anyway, I think we should upgrade sometime in the near future. The upgrade would involve:
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• Setting up a test board that is exactly like LinuxBoards (has all the hacks intalled, etc) and making sure the upgrade works.  
• Making a list of 3.5 hacks that we want and need.  
• Modifying the template so that it works with 3.5  
• Updating the test board to 3.5 and applying all the new hacks and making the template work  
• Once all goes well with the test board, updating the live board and installing the new hacks on the live board.

It would be alot of work, but to start we could compile a list of the hacks that we would want for 3.5. If you tell me what hacks we have right now I can go searching for the 3.5 versions.

What do you thnik dyna? Time to upgrade? vBulletin 3.5 is very nice :D

Alright, I\'ll see if I can dig up those hacks. I also vote that we add the Advanced Warning System hack (Check it out here). AWS is a great way to enforce rules (it allows moderators a way to warn members when they break rules, in their posts or signature, and has a ton of options. Each warning gives the member a pre-defined number of points, and after X points the member is banned for X days. It has a ton of configurations, and is a great hack.

I also reccomend we add the Report Own Post plugin (check it out here), which is a great way for members to report their own posts that need editing or deleting.

With the new version of vbulletin comes, above all, the new Plugin system. Installing all these mods will be a snap, and only require editing of the template.

Now, to procede...
The steps we need to take in order to get ready for the upgrade:

• Setup a test board with the current version of vbulletin 3.0.7 (we can do this using Impex (i made a post on the vbulletin forums about this, I\'ll see what they say)
• Update the test board to version 3.0.9, make sure that all goes smoothly.
• Update the main board to 3.0.9.
• Update the test board to a non-hacked version of 3.5.0
• Update our theme to make it work with 3.5.0 (this is supposed to be very easy)
• Add the 3.5 hacks to the test board

After we make sure all goes well with the test board, we can update the main board. I suggest we start early on a Friday night in November for the main board update, if that is convenient for you. vBulletin updates always take a long time, unfortunatly, but this update is well worth it.

November sounds like a good date too, since many of the hacks that we use right now are still in beta, and while they are stable, in november they will be even more stable.

I will continue looking into this.

 
Update: I got a list of hacks together that we will need. ArticleBot has been discontinued and replaced with a new hack called Inferno RSS News Feeds (which is said to be better), the vB Garage hack is nowhere to be found , and vB Articles is still being ported.
Other than that, vBa CMPS has been ported over, and there are alot of new hacks out there too. A few new ones:

 
-/me irc support (allows users to type /me, just like in IRC)
-Advanced Warning System (easy system for moderators to warn users)
-Report Own Post (vB 3.5 disables the Report Your Own Post feature. This hack re-enables it)

I installed the Inferno RSS Forum Feeds on my test board and it\'s great. When I put it on my forums I will let you all know.

That hack works awesome on 3.5! Very simple to use I must say. Being used on my new forums with google rss
 
-Dave