Hey Rodrigo,
Happy to see your message. I´m also brazilian and I use Bruce´s solution for more than 10 years I believe.
I also need some urgent upgrades, including social login almost as the top of the list.
There are also some other stuff that I believe that would make our life easier, including Bruce´s life too !!! :)
Like updating to HTML5 and a responsive design (maybe using bootrap 4!). This would kill mobile version and keep one version only - that works well in mobile and anything else. Code would be much much simpler and faster.
Rewriting the code for forum_posts is the hardest, but changing from old nested HTML tables to new divs or even flexbox, would make code smaller and easier to maintain.
Also, separating design (html) from server side code, would make it much easier to do mods. (I have refactored some of my codes and it´s worth).
As Bruce said... it´s now open source and opened for contribution... so... I believe that you, me and more people that are interested, could help it somehow!
It seems easy, but it´s sure a lot of work and take some months, so, maybe, we could somehow do a crowdfunding and having a programmer to do it. Bruce could find a local programmer that he can have control on (not to have the risk of abandoning the project).
This would be awesome! And actually, maybe this will be really necessary for the future... as search engines could start to have bad reputation on non HTML5 code... who knows ?!
Our job would be to decide how advanced we should go, considering that are hundred of active foruns that could have old tech users. Maybe best approach would be to have a totally new version as you said... Like... regular WWF forum will have security updates only, but the Premium / Enterprise / Whatever version will be HTML 5, responsive, flexbox ready and so. Since the core server side code could be almost the same, security updates of the regular version could be totally compatible to the new version.
I have done plenty of mods in my foruns and I could help with opinions and time... and of course, with the crowdfunding!
What do you think Bruce ?