SMF has served us well. It's still decent forum software, but it's open source, which means people are maintaining it in their free time, and there isn't an actual team of people paid to work on the forum software, which means support could end at any time if no one has interest in working on it. Development on SMF has seemed to have really slowed down over the past few years. It's possible people are losing interest in the project. Which is understandable, no one has the same interests forever.
This is why if we are moving forum softwares, it's going to be to a paid forum software. You get what you pay for. You are paying for top quality software backed by a support team and timely updates along with features. I've messed around with myBB before. It's cool, but not all that different from SMF, and has some cons of it's own compared to SMF.
At the moment, Xenforo is looking like the most likely candidate. But if you have any suggestions of paid forum software to check out, we're definitely still willing to look at other stuff and see if it can fit our needs. I will say though that I have done a ton of research in regards to forum software.
I've been working on a Xenforo theme in my free time, that's how likely we are to go with Xenforo, it will be done when it's done though. It's really different from SMF and has been quite the learning curve for me in regards to working with making a theme around it. I'm not a fan of the default Xenforo theme so I plan to make the SEGAbits theme for Xenforo look quite a bit different.
Let's go back to that weird red forum SegaNerds used back in 2006 or thereabouts.
The one where you could see who was printing out forum topics.
