yup, owned license expired and the forum that I was using on it, has since closed. So, I dont run an open forum anymore and develop this for the love/hate of spammers. I contacted vBulletin and asked them If I could use a newer version, just to code against and they gave me the answer I expected, that being a "pay up". I do have a 3.8.1 that a friend has on his forum, that Ive installed as his development system and hes happy with that.
For the sake of getting valuable mods out, I thought vbulletin would be happy to provide updates to code, to developers but I guess not. I myself am only licensed to 3.7.6 I think, which is what Im using to code 0.7 on. Once Im happy with a set of code changes, then I export/import into 3.8.1. This is the only way to do it,. code against old source, pay up (for a version that I will never use myself) or download an p**ate version just to develop against

(which Im not doing before ppl start screaming).
Much of the code changes from his 3.8.1 to the current 3.8.4 are bug fixes (if not all of them) so the underlying structure of the mod isnt affected too much.