I'm sure lots of people are wondering if their plugins will be compatible with PHP 7 and VB 4.2.5. If we made a PHP7 plugin compatibility thread, would people post what they have experienced in terms of plugin compatibility in one thread? Sadly I don't have anything to add because I haven't tried the upgrade yet but with everyone's input it would be easier for people to make the decision to upgrade and get the speed increase

Anything written with care in the last 3 years should be compatible. I know I always took care to not use anything that the PHP manual stated would be deprecated.

Also don't forget that many older 3.x mods still work on 4.x, the basic simple mods will typically carry over and work fine. It's complex mods dealing with many features and such that were coded a few years back and never "maintained" that will be the issue for most when upgrading to vBulletin 4.2.5 to run with PHP7.

For sure you will need to check all your plugins and redo some if they have issues when running with php 7. :)

I still run three vB forums on version 4.2, will there ever be any security updates released?

No, there won't be any updates related to PHP versions. There's a tiny chance they might do a security update if a huge hole gets uncovered in v4 but that seems unlikely at this level of maturity.

That sucks, cause I will never move to vB 5.

Makes no sense. VB 5 is awful no offense. Looks just as bad xenforo. Vbulletin 4 was the best. So I'm pretty much screwed. Just came back into the forum scene and I guess I can't run vbulletin 4...

Why? I still run 3 boards on vB 4.2.4 and if you run vB 4.2.5 you can use PHP 7.

Also worth mentioning that a few code changes will also allow 4.2.5 to work on PHP 7.2 and beyond. My current board runs on PHP 7.3 and has been tested on 7.4. I'm also fairly confident it'll run on PHP 8 too.