The forum software I'm using is pretty lame. Should change to something better You get line breaks if you set the format to "text" from the radio button below ...
I would have migrated to vBulletin or similar already, if I had found migration tools (from Vanilla). Didn't find any when I looked year ago or so. Wouldn't want to loose all the messages.
It's not perfect, but simply starting anew and giving a link to the old forum (posting disabled) is always an alternative. Maybe manually migrate the stickies, as well as making a new one with a link to the old forum.
Comments
I'm pretty sure there's a Vanilla -> phpBB importer out there.
http://sourceforge.net/apps/wordpress/vanilla2phpbb3/2010/01/29/converting-vanilla-1-1-10-to-phpbb-2-0-23/