Sorry for the delay, I recently sold the domains and hosting side of my business and I've been busy with that process.
That necessitates moving Foot.ie to a new server, and I'm disinclined to do so as-is because the installed version of vBulletin won't run on PHP > 5.6, and even the final version (that was upgraded just to support PHP 7) only goes to PHP 7.1. This is still very, very old, and more importantly, it's actually quite difficult to install because even the guys that host old version repositories don't carry it any more.
So the priority is now migration to a new platform, with the data as-is, and I'll come back to your (very welcome!) suggestions when that's done. That process should be a lot easier on the new platform, Discourse, which will likely be one you recognise even if you don't know the name, because it's used pretty widely around the web.
I've just this minute built a new VPS for the site and I'll be working on installing and configuring Discourse over the weekend. I'll update next week.
