These are all excellent suggestions. The fact of the matter though is until the player base feels a sense of urgency to migrate to 0.4, people will not migrate to 0.4.
This is a point I highlighted in the VC:MP forums at one point — 0.4 was revered as the solution to all of 0.3's problems until it was released, at which point it was ignored.
Yes, I agree. I always treated the presumption of the 0.4 panacea with extreme doubt.
It is definitely up to the community to start moving people to 0.4, and there is no better place to start discussing how than here (that is, presuming the same number of people who used to visit this forum still do).
Perhaps it would be a good idea to open up a bunch of ghost servers, with bots in them, whose servernames declare that 0.4 is here and point people to the new forum where they can download it. It is simply a matter of getting the message across, because I'm certain that 99% of VC:MP players simply don't know that 0.4 exists.
And we must pressure server owners to start moving and assisting in the shift. Does anyone know if anyone at Sky City or LWs has put into their scripts announcements about 0.4? That should be a priority.
Following a different prong of inquiry, how come access to the official site and the masterlist has been lost? This is perhaps one of the bigger obstacles, because when vcmp is googled, it is the old download page that is shown. If the website can't be changed, Stormeus, do you still have admin permissions on the forum? You could hide or archive all the boards except for that which pronounces the move to the new forum, and the release of 0.4.
What's perhaps most concerning if access has been permanently lost, is that if the 0.3 masterlist is to go down (which it often has done in the past, for a number of reasons), then VC:MP will certainly stand the risk of dying. I can't remember which year it was but there was a period once when the masterlist was down for a month or two, and the damage to VC:MP was gigantic. It took at least a year for the mod to gain a playerbase comparable in size to that which had been lost.
What exactly has happened?
P.S. Thanks!