[Oni]

It's always cheaper to do it yourself. You just need to assess the damage if it's something you're capable of fixing or doing yourself. Luckily AI is around to help produce most of the things that would need an "updating" or "improving" on here.

In hindsight, the $350 quote was extremely fair. I just chose to pay with my time instead. Less about money and more that certain elements of the site needed to remain private. That said, there's plenty of limitations and I'd imagine if someone was attempting the same re-launch without the same knowledge of MyBB, the outcome would be pretty terrible. Great tool if you have a solid understanding of what you're modifying/updating, potentially catastrophic if you don't.

Yes, AI is a force multiplier, especially if you know what you are doing. Its also an extremely great tool for learning, and learning fast!!

I like describing it as a "force multiplier" as well. It still requires input from someone knowledgeable and can still make plenty of mistakes.

Im extremely careful when dealing with sensitive data. I never create API tokens that will allow an AI agent to write / update / modify to a database.

I will usually build an entirely separate database to clone the data and leave the production data alone, and then work exclusively on the cloned DB.

This is what I did personally. I used a "dummy" copy of the database, with certain MyBB tables anonymized/wiped.