Services
Still running vBulletin 3?
We are one of very few teams still working on it. We can keep your board running, make it safer, and move it when you are ready, in that order and at your pace.
The situation you are probably in
vBulletin 3.8 was the last of the 3.x line, and it has had no vendor support for well over a decade. The boards still running it are rarely small: they are communities with fifteen or twenty years of posts, thousands of members, and an archive that is the entire reason the site matters.
Which usually means some combination of:
- the host wants to upgrade PHP, and the board breaks when they do. vBulletin 3 was written against database functions that PHP removed in version 7;
- the server is old and cannot be patched without breaking the forum, so it has not been patched;
- the developer who maintained it has moved on, retired, or stopped replying;
- custom modifications nobody has the source for, doing something important;
- quotes to "just migrate to something modern" that treat twenty years of archive as an inconvenience.
What we can do
- Get it running again. Boards that are down, throwing database errors, or broken by a server change.
- Make the server safe to update. Getting an old board onto a supported operating system and a PHP version your host will still maintain.
- Harden what cannot be patched. Reverse proxies, request filtering, access control, and reducing what is exposed at all.
- Repair damaged data. We have recovered forums whose databases were incomplete, corrupted, or both.
- Untangle old modifications. Working out what a custom hack does before deciding whether it survives a move.
- Migrate, when you want to. Usually to XenForo or Discourse. Posts, members and attachments come across, and so do the URLs, which is the part most migrations get wrong and the reason twenty years of search traffic survives the move.
- Look after it afterwards. Backups, monitoring and somebody to call.
What we cannot do
We cannot make unsupported software permanently safe, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
vBulletin 3 receives no security patches. Every year it runs, the gap between it and the software around it widens, and the surface you have to defend by other means grows. We can reduce the risk substantially, often enough to buy years of comfortable operation. We cannot remove it.
What we will do is tell you plainly where you stand, what it costs to hold the line, and what it costs to move. Then it is your decision. Plenty of boards run on vBulletin 3 quite happily with the right precautions. Some should have moved five years ago. They are not the same situation and they should not get the same advice.
Two of our long-standing clients started on vBulletin 3. One runs Discourse today. The other runs current vBulletin. Both had good reasons, and neither was talked into it, which is the only evidence we can offer that we are not selling a predetermined answer.
Why us
We have been working on forum infrastructure since 2001, and on vBulletin since the 3.x days. Not as history. We still have clients on boards we first touched in 2010.
We have taken a client's forums the whole distance, from vBulletin 3 through every platform generation since, to the Discourse installations they run today. We have merged boards whose databases had been split apart by earlier disasters, and rebuilt communities from a drive that came back empty.
Old, awkward, poorly documented systems are the normal case here rather than the exception.
Tell us what your board is doing
You do not need to diagnose it first. If it is down, say so and we will look.