A free alternative

[Trey Strain Guardian of the Universe Find all posts View Profile Close Trey Strain]

Have you guys thought about moving to boards.com? It's free.

[Trey Strain Guardian of the Universe Find all posts View Profile Close Trey Strain]

Well, this free alternative is available.

https://www.proboards.com/

[Star-Lantern Weaponer of Qward Find all posts View Profile Close Star-Lantern]

Free doesn't always = better. Also, once you pay for a vbulletin license, you don't have to buy it again, unless you want to upgrade your board to the next major version. Therefore, the forum is not really a regular expense (or it doesn't have to be), that would be the web hosting and domain name.

However, if I were to recommend a free forum, it would not be proboards. It would Simple Machines Forums:http://www.simplemachines.org/

Also, moving from one forum software to another can be a serious task if you want to preserve your data, and usually, you would want to. Otherwise you would lose all your members and posts, which very well may kill the forum (no exaggeration there). Some would sign up again, but a lot wouldn't, and all the indexing done in search engines would be lost.

Also, it can damage your community in other ways (not just data loss). The sense of familiarity users may have could be gone going to a different software, and they may find the new software and environment strange and not intuitive, and may stop posting as much or coming at all. In short, I would not recommend doing it just to do it, especially to take a huge step down from a vbulletin forum to a proboards one.

So yeah, I'm not the administrator, but I would highly advise against changing forum softwares.