Hi Scotty,
There are a number of reasons:
1) We can require registration to help prevent spam. This forum gets a fair amount of it and continually removing it has been a problem. There have also been issues with the keyword filtering being a pain to legitimate users.
2) We can integrate it with the look of the AISG site. This makes a more coherent experience for the users (also making it more likely that visitors to the forum will notice the member galleries and other parts of the site).
3) AISG will get the Google page rank for posts to the forum, improving our rankings in search results and adding more value to membership.
4) AISG can collect the advertising revenue instead of it going to eBoards.
5) The new forum has a continuous stream format for replies instead of requiring the user to click back and forward through threads. IMHO, This makes it easier to follow a conversation.
6) We control the source code for the forum, so we can add features as required (e.g. image support in posts is one we are working on).
Those are the main reasons off the top of my head. The main drawbacks/problems are/have been:
1) The link will change, so users will have to update their bookmarks
2) There have been some unforseen registration problems with Hotmail
3) The domain hasn't been configured to activate the new site nearly as quickly as expected. We're still waiting on the domain administrator to complete the reconfiguration.
Once we get 2 & 3 sorted out, 1 should resolve itself fairly easily.