vBulletin - We'll Be Switching Soon

I can almost hear the screams of pain, "But we like this", "Vanilla is so simple", "But vBulletin is ugly", etc

But, hear me out here... the problems with Vanilla, let me list some:
[ulist]
[li]The page numbers of threads don't add up when there are lots of whispers[/li]
[li]The editor requires you know all of this bbcode rubbish[/li]
[li]The who's online is so intensive it uses most of the server power, limits growth (or increases costs as we grow)[/li]
[li]You can't upload images and have to host them yourself[/li]
[li]You don't have polls[/li]
[li]All of the stickies are in one place and take half of the first page[/li]
[li]The notifications are pretty dumb[/li]
[li]You can't find and search just your whispers[/li]
[li]The members page is retarded, unsearchable, doesn't show who they are, and because of the lack of pagination will have to be disabled soon as we're growing and that page is doing 1 SQL query per member = 1,600 queries for one page already[/li]
[li]You can't see who is replying to who... as in, if posts 1, 2, and 3 exist and 3 was a response to 1, then it looks like 3 is a response to 2 and it's confusing on very long threads when people reply to things much earlier[/li]
[li]I can't administer the forum... there are no tools to merge duplicate threads together[/li]
[li]I can't help people who are stuck, there's no manual way for me to reset a password as I was asked to do so just two days ago[/li]
[li]There's no mailing list, which means you can't opt out when I choose to dump the whole email address, and it means I get my gmail banned as I send too many emails when I do send a mail-out[/li]
[li]Hard to add custom pages, I want to integrate the stolen bikes stuff as well as add an area to give sponsors of events more exposure[/li]
[/ulist]

The list can just go on really. Vanilla is lovely when you're small, but starts to struggle when you're larger. And the bigger we get, the more overhead there is in running the show, and the more it becomes hard to follow stuff because of the pace of the front page updating.

So, we will be moving to vBulletin and it will be soon.

Once we have moved, I would like to get a designer to help me make it pretty. From day one I will make a half-arsed attempt to get it to resemble Vanilla in colours and header and stuff... but ideally it would look much better than Vanilla laid over vBulletin. Focus will be on usability, readability, ensuring that the key thing is the posts and the funny stuff and not the clutter of the forum. vBulletin design will be ripped apart and most of their icons and images will be ditched. There will still be no signatures, no smilies, no retarded stuff basically.

So this is notice that it will happen.

When it happens, you'll have about 2 hours downtime... so I'll try and do it when we're not too busy.

After it has happened you will need to re-upload your avatar. Currently we don't store them so I can't migrate it over... so make sure you have a note of where your avatar is so that you can upload it.

Your username will stay the same, and your password, and all of the posts, threads, whispers will be kept. Nothing like that will be lost.