We need donations for a vBulletin license upgrade
We need $175 to purchase a series v4 license from vBulletin in order to have access to future version upgrades. You can visit our <a href="http://www.pokemontopaz.net/donate/">donation page</a> if you would like to chip in via a debit/credit card or Paypal account.
Due to difficulties and potential problems of accepting money through the mail or other means, this will be our only method of soliciting donations. Some of you may be wondering why this is necessary, so I will take the time to explain. Feel free to skip the lengthy clarification.
We have had this vBulletin license since the days that Pokemon Topaz was hosted on PokeRealm. I originally purchased a leased vBulletin license for $80, with the help of donations, which was only good for one year. After my departure from PokeRealm, BlackTigress paid the full amount of $160 to upgrade it to an owned license.
However, this license was a v3.x series license - meaning it was only good for vBulletin version 3. There was a fee of $30 per year to have access to upgrades, which BlackTigress paid a couple of times. The last time it was paid was on July 24th of 2009, before version 4 came out.
The folks at Jelsoft were gracious enough to allow their version 3 license holders access to vBulletin version 4 upgrades for free - for the remaining duration of their eligibility for upgrades. Our access to upgrades will expire on July 24th, 2010 - next month.
"Well why can't we just stay on 4.0.3?", you may be thinking. The answer is because of two important reasons. One is that we won't have access to the eventual 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, etc versions which will likely add new features or upgrades of existing features that would be greatly desirable to have. The second reason, more important than the first, is that security fixes are only released for the latest version of vBulletin. If there is an exploit found in, say, 4.0.8 that also affects 4.0.3 then only a fix for 4.0.8 will be available. Users running 4.0.3 would have no way of fixing this exploit and would be very vulnerable.
So now you see why this is necessary, and why we need your help. Thanks for reading, and hopefully we'll get enough donations to get this done by next month!
