Muliple things. I am scared to death of the upgrade.
 

I have two forums. One of the is locked down for now, the other quite active.

I want to upgrade the active forum, not sure what I will do with the closed one but I will get to that later.

Before I get to my active forum I do have a general question.

I have not seen a forum like this (but I don't visit many since I have my own forum) that is structured like multiple forums. Lets see if I can describe what I am talking about.

You go into the main forum and has the typical divisions like what I think of as a typical forum. You click on one of the forums and some of them take you in what appears to be a whole new forum. This forum within a forum would like a whole independent forum and could be such that those that are only interested in that topic might go there directly and skip the main page entirely. I guess a structure with a generalists area then each forum underneath to take you to a full blown forum within a forum. Can I do this with VB?

Ok..on to my active forum. My active forum has almost 18k members and is about 3 years old. It is SMF.
I am not an IT person and run things by the seat of my pants and do not know what I am doing. The way it is set up on my server I understand is pretty bad. I had hired it done originally and three sites are under one domain and the sites are as subdomains. I don't always know what belongs to who. I have folders for my store and for the forum all lumped together it looks like. I would like to seperate them properly on the server and I think the upgrade to VB is a good time to do that.

I did buy a copy of VB but never downloaded it maybe a couple of years ago. Can I just upgrade that and use it or do I need to buy new again?

I am terrified of getting started on this. I know I am going to mess something up moving from SMF to VB.

The closed forum is one I purchased from someone that was not using it. It is a VB forum, it is soo full of spam is is sickening. I shut it down and it has set idle for a couple of years. I know I need to update that thing and get the thousands upon thousands of spam posts out of there if I want to use that forum again.

I figure setting up my upgrade will allow me to better know how VB works and is structured but I know I am going to have major troubles.

Wow....this is about the most non-sensical post ever.