[In Omnibus]

Originally Posted by Meister2017

There are still many hosters that even offer PHP 5.6.

Apart from that vbulletin 4.2.5 also runs under PHP 7.3.

Not unless you've modified it. They didn't put this on the downloads page for their health.

Note : Only the versions below support PHP 7
PHP 7.0: vBulletin 5.2.5-5.4.5, 4.2.5 and 3.8.11 support PHP 7.0
PHP 7.1: vBulletin 5.2.6+, 4.2.5 and 3.8.11 support PHP 7.1
PHP 7.2: vBulletin 5.3.4+ support PHP 7.2.
PHP 7.3: vBulletin 5.4.5+ support PHP 7.3.
vBulletin 3 and vBulletin 4 do not support PHP 7.2.

PHP 5.6 was declared End Of Life January of this year so while some hosts may continue to run it they could pull it at any time without notice. It's not a risk I would take if I were running a board of any substance.

Aside from that vBulletin 4 was developed using HTML 4.01 and CSS 2. HTML 5 has been the industry standard since 2014 and CSS 3 has been the industry standard since a year or less after vBulletin 4 was initially released.

The discussion here is about why the developers will not be taking on the project of bringing vBulletin 4 up to current industry standards. Holding to that the last two posts are irrelevant. This isn't about whether or not you can make it work today. There will be a day when you cannot make it work. That might be sooner or later. I don't have a crystal ball that tells me when hosting companies will pull the plug on PHP 5.x versions. It will probably be as soon as some security flaw is discovered that isn't going to be patched because, again, security updates ceased in January.

Having said all of that I cannot fathom why a forums administrator would want to continue to work with decade plus old software technology and design knowing that social media has trampled that philosophy and that the survival of forums depends upon evolution. The idea of giving members stupid and useless crap in the form of add ons and mods to keep them around has long outlived its usefulness.

People in the year 2019 want the most bang for their buck, so to speak. They want information overload or entertainment overload. They want the most return with the least investment. If any part of the process is too involved they move on to something else. It's the instant gratification generation. They want it all and they want it now. vBulletin 4 doesn't work that way and it never did. Registration isn't one step. Accessing content isn't one click. Commenting or replying isn't anonymous. Notifications aren't limited to only what someone cares about. The entire approach of traditional forum software is ass backwards.

While I have said this before elsewhere vBulletin 5 is the only forum software that has made any effort to adapt to 2019. It was released far too early and initially had far too many problems that gave it a bad reputation. A good number of people took third party opinion and ran with it. A good number of people migrated to other forum software which (surprise) was nothing more than vBulletin 4 clones. vBulletin 5 today is not the product it was when it was initially released. There are a number of things it does or can do that no other forum software does and that no other forum software will be able to do out of the box. The people who speak ill of it have obviously not used it. Does it still have bugs? Yes, but so does Windows 10 and they have far more than the four developers vB5 has. Literally, thousands of bugs have been resolved and thousands of improvements have been made since initial release.

Forums are a dying or dead niche. Trying to keep a small number of long-time members happy by holding on to outdated software with useless add ons and mods isn't going to change that. The only successful business model is "adapt or die."

Asking someone to invest on the development of vBulletin 4 is like asking someone to invest in the development of the Ford Model T. It lacks power and safety features, and it may not even be safe for highway transportation since it's top speed is well under the posted 65MPH limit but, dagnabit, someone just has to have one because reasons! I'm not that someone.