Maybe someone could let me know why so many sites don't keep up on upgrading to the newest version of vB? Are they worried they will loose members if the forum changes to much?

The only conclusion that I can see would be that some sites stick with what works and may have hacks and changes that will not upgrade without lots of work.

What has been your reason?

Normally todo with a hacked board, or if vB2 to vB3 because of loss of style.

That was one of our reasons ... we only patched security holes while we were on vb2 because of the amount of undocumented custom hacks we had (bad on our part).

With vb3, we've been keeping things rather organized and upgrading our hacked board from RC4 to vb303 didnt take too long.

Yeppers..I have one board on vb301 because I don't want to reinstall the hacks and all, and a new board, owned by a friend of mine is running 3.0.3 as its fairly new.

I think that its because of hacks that people have installed on their boards...

It's the hacks which keep me from upgrading. I probably won't upgrade until there's a major new addition, major bug fix or new functionality is added which I think will be of benefit.

Indeed..in most cases it will be due to the hacks.

A few weeks ago, I upgraded to 3.0.2..it took like 2 or 3 days to re-hack all the files on the new version, but I finally got it up and working sweet.

I then logged on to vB.com. OH DEAR GOD! They had released 3.0.3 in that time.

I was not a happy chappy.

I am now tho.

Updating software is very important. It fixes known bugs, known issues, design problems and possible security bugs.

It is ok to wait for a period of time, so you don't always have to upgrade, and I stand behind the saying 'don't fix it if it isn't broken'. If your site runs fine, no issues, don't upgrade! But if you have a big site, don't have the time to make daily backups; then I do advise to upgrade once a year at least. It costs you a day, but wins you weeks of downtime if someone exploits it or your database becomes corrupt due to software bug.

I trust Jelsoft quite a bit, and I upgrade everything in the same 24 hours. If not only to find bugs! :)

I've stuck with 3.0.0 but simply because of the hacks and the can't be arsed factor. I'm having a bad enough time at the moment with my IPB site that I've upgraded to IPB 2 and having to restyle that and keep up with the RC's so no plans to upgrade to the latest vB3 yet. I have got 3.0.1, 3.0.2 and 3.0.3 downloaded and unzipped ready for uploading as a clean version if I really wanted to though.To upgrade, you only need 3.0.3 and not 3.0.1 and 3.0.2 :)

Most people *probably* wait for essential updates other then the smaller ones. I know I would! :)