Yup. Keep this one around as an archive, completely wipe the forum, and make a new one that doens't look so old. Use something like Xenforo, get a professional theme made, filter out the useless shit that nobody uses or ever gets to see, and vuala. The current forum is just too old looking, the game is getting some awesome UI improvements so there is no reason to not completely revamp the forum. I'm expected the whole "man power" argument, please, there are so many people amongst the community who would absolutely help for free. I also recall sir saying something about how it's backend is very old, and having everything hooked into the game is a terrific hassle as it is, so all of that would have to be remade.

I'm sure they've got something like this planned for TBN, and if so, awesome, I'd love to hear that.

Everything's tied to VB, changing it would kill everything - including your accounts

jesus christ, coming from a software developer, there must have been some fucking horrid, horrible, terrible design choices made in the beginning, that sounds almost impossible. surely if all players' info was stored in a database, it would be separate from the forums? or you could at least extract it in a flat-file format of some sort and then "load it in" to the new forum, but you shouldn't do that either, people's accounts should be separate from the forums and the game, that's what sounds right anyway

...uh no. Yes it'd require a little more than zero effort to migrate accounts to another forum engine but it obviously wouldn't kill everything.

Regarding the suggestion, what you're asking for doesn't require moving to a different engine. Looks aren't dependent on forum's internal organization, and adapting all torishop features to new backend isn't worth it.

If the website is running on the same engine it always has been, then let the game itself exemplify why that's a terrible idea. I've heard plenty rumor that the reason Toribash has a hard time implementing new things is because the engine is older than me, but if that's just rumor then alright, but there's probably a good reason you are developing TBN on Unity. The aesthetics of the website should be changed, disregarding the engine, but honestly, Xenforo or the likes are very stable and have hundreds of thousands of people who are comfortable making complex themes for it, meaning you could toss someone $75 and they'd have it all ready for you in a few days.

Yeah this is true I don't think this would be possible. they would have to setup entirely new servers to connect the game to the site and online play.

No offense, but I'm taking Sir, a current day developer's word, over an ex-developer and a casual player's. And what you said isn't impossible, not even near difficult.