Edit and save each of them, and the difference between 3.6.8 and 3.8.x is pretty minor, I can't think of a good reason why'd they break between those versions.

Resaving each should trigger it to get a current rundate.

Not entirely true Zachery, reason being once you manually run it, the date will change to the correct one, i've fixed this a few times in the past its not vbulletin, its the server & its setup, editing them will not fix the issue, they should go back to 2008 if its what i think it is, but again im not going to speculate on it as i dont know his setup.

I just ran the promotions cron job again and the next scheduled run is still "04/07/2013
03h01"

hmmm weird..

Yea, its screwed, im guessing at this point if you leave it alone for a while, it will either resort back to 2008 or stay stuck there.

Unfortunately not knowing your server setup, i dont want to put you on a wild goose chase, but do this for now.

As you have another forum setup, delete the user cron from the cron jobs, then add it back manually, get the settings from your other site or copy them.

Then retest, see if it runs by itself or if it doesnt, report back the date/time its now stuck on.

Given my experience, in troubleshooting this explicit issue, running then generally won't fix it. The edit and save will. But what do I know? :rolleyes:

i've already tryed that and it didnt help :(

i can give you access to my server if you want to check, but i moved to a new dedicated server a few months ago and the old server had the same problem...

To the original complaint of users who get promoted finding themselves banned - did I miss something or did anyone ask about usergroup settings for the new usergroup?

Settings like, "Is this a banned group? (Yes) (No)" It is under "Usergroup Options" in Usergroup manager, on the page where you adjust the settings. About 3/4 of the way down the page. It actually says:

This Usergroup is not a 'Banned' Group (Setting this to no will cause the group to be treated as a banned group, this will prevent the sending of email notifications, show a banned error message on the permission error pages and other unspecified behaviors.) Yes No

Do these users actually get promoted to the new group? Or do they stay in the same group they were in and are just banned?

Damn i had totally forgotten about this setting and i think it actually fixed my problem LOL

Anyway i would still like to fix the cron job problem as it creates various other issues. For example VB doesn't do the regular "cleaning" anymore so sometimes my users can't connect to the forum because the table vb_session is full... I had to manually create a php cron job to periodically clear the table vb_session

Ha! Glad to have helped somewhat! As far as unbanning those users en masse, I think fixing this setting does that for you automatically.

Yes I agree, this is why I originally focused on the cron not running. That's a big problem that can cause a myriad of varied issues.