What do you hate about it? The first question I think to ask yourself is what you're attempting to "fix" by swapping to XenForo. Obviously most of us here like using XenForo and it meets our needs, but I'm not sure there is anything fundamentally wrong with phpBB. I think establishing what and why you want to change will help you evaluate XenForo as an option. I only briefly used phpBB when I took on a site some years back and it seemed perfectly functional. I didn't use if long enough to form any strong feelings about it, but my advice would be to be sure that whatever it is that you "hate" isn't something that can easily be fixed prior to going through the "fun and games" of purchasing new software, setting up said software, styling the software, scheduling in the migration and so forth.
You can certainly ask away in the forums here or
directly contact the XenForo team if it's more sales related.
Whilst I've don't know if XenForo offer any refund options, I have heard that people sell un-needed licences to other members here (although I would assume at a discounted rate) so you might be able to recoup some funds if you found you didn't get on well with it. Generally I find XenForo easy to work with, but your milage may vary depending on what you want it to do.
There are a range of both free and paid for styles available for XenForo, which you can use and modify. Or you can create your own. Certainly incorporating your existing banner would not be overly difficult. However that would all very much depend on your own skills with HTML and CSS or those you have access to. I'd have thought within the demo you could work with the styles and templates to at least get a feel for what can be done, however I've never tried the demo so I can't be sure, but beerForo was able to in the demo. Are you apple to access that part of the Admin UI (ie the appearance section)?
As mentioned by a few other posters none of us are aware of XenForo offering discounts to the licence costs. However you can
contact them and ask. I think it unlikely they will offer you a discount however, but no harm in asking! I've found discounts only really exist either down to pure philanthropy or to encourage lifetime adoption (think educational discounts on things like Office365 - get them using your product when young) or to ensure you get some money when the thing is costing you money - so products sat in warehouses costing rent, or empty seats on flights and so forth. Things where it's better to sell at a reduced rate than not to sell because there is an inherent cost. Alas general software like XenForo doesn't really fit those, so you're totally down to pure philanthropy I suspect. Still the worst they can say is "nope"!
It's worth noting that you only need an active licence if you want to ask the XenForo team for support or you wish to download a newly released version of XenForo. So you can let your licence safely lapse until a new version that you want has been released, then buy the renewal. That might reduce your ongoing annual costs somewhat. However XenForo is commercial software and that costs money for my own personal (non profit) sites I find the licence costs (and costs for various add-ons and so forth) to be acceptable, but some of that is down to efficiency - using just one forum platform makes my life easier and I'm willing to pay a bit for that.
That would appear to be because you don't have an "index" page setup at the root of your web host. Your existing forum appears to be installed into a subdirectory (/forums) and with that kind of setup you'd normally expect to see some kind of "home page" or have a redirect in place to push visitors to the forums. You alluded to a redirection in a later post about
.htaccess files so it sounds like you maybe had a redirection in place at one point.
If no-one has been able to offer any specific advise your best bet is to review some of the
existing threads on the subject. Certainly for the sites we host the "off the shelf" system appears perfectly acceptable.
There are importers for several other forums. I imported a phpBB one myself into XF. The importers are available as a separate download once you have a licence. There are a few threads that discuss importing from phpBB, you might want to search and read a few,
for example. There are some members here who offer contract services for that kind of work you could consider employing if it's not something you feel comfortable tackling.
Sorry to hear of your diagnosis, a truly horrible disease. Have you considered (if you've perhaps started to find some of the more nuanced technical aspects of the hosting becoming harder) any "managed hosting" type options? Obviously XenForo do their own cloud offering, but I believe there are one or two other companies that offer more of a managed XenForo service, which might leave you to deal more with just the admin via the UI side of things? Equally I'm sure there are similar offerings for other forum products. It might not suit, personally I like my data sat on my servers in my racks, granted in someone else's data centre (can't be too greedy). However even I acknowledge sometimes it makes sense to outsource some aspects!
Anyhow I doubt you'd be disappointed with XenForo, but without knowing what you dislike about phpBB it's hard to say it'll fix the issues you're currently experiencing.
Great being shown up by a 9 year old, isn't it? lol.
