You guys I meant that as an in-general statement regarding the Donate button here on most modification threads if the developer has entered in a paypal address in his/her settings it had nothing to do with the vbsso site at all... I see now that you meant their but ok so let's just agree to disagree here by reading the below

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I'm assuming that you must manually initiate an upgrade to mediawiki correct? If so then that means you cannot use a newer version with this mod or more specifically you cannot use a version higher than the one used before the bug was introduced until it is fixed (unless that bug has always existed). It's one of those scenarios we see on rare occasions where a mod has not been updated to run on a newer version of vBulletin or php for that matter and if it's someothing a site depends on heavily they tend to not upgrade until the mod is updated to work properly with vB/php version. What that bug states is what you're describing pmcpa and see the comment made on Feb 4th of this year per the link above, seems like a fix is planned for the next release of mediawiki.
xeagle thank you for the links and clarification

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