vBulletin.Org Upgrade

[Paul M]

Atm, we are still running on vB 3.6.12 and php 5.2.
This is a very old PHP version now and our servers are (over)due an upgrade.

As we have on many occasions stated, we have remained on vB 3.6 because of the complexity of our customisations, and the work involved in upgrading. However, we now have reached the point where we must upgrade [due to said server upgrades] and as such we started planing an upgrade to vB 3.8.9 (and php 5.5) last summer.

Since then I have been working on the massive task of upgrading and testing (along side all my other work). Since the start we have also progressed to using php 5.6 & vB 3.8.10.

The actual upgrade and switchover is currently planned for Monday Feb 29th (US Time), and there will likely be a few hours where the site does not function, or is down intermittantly. If this date changes, I will update this announcement.

Since this is also a complex upgrade, there is a 100% certainty that some things will either be broken or not quite right after the main switch. I will start looking at them in the days & weeks after the change.

Please bear this in mind after Feb 29th, and if you discover issues, wait a day and see if they still persist, if they do, log a bug report in the "vBulletin.org Site Feedback" forum.
TheLastSuperman (or other staff) will add confirmed issues to the internal vbulletin.org Jira project (viewable by staff only).

JFYI, we have over 150 hook plugins, over 100 customised templates, many custom php functions in our own files, and custom Javascript.