Yes enabling that setting will trigger rewards based on a members total donations rather then the new donation they are making at the time. In that scenario you would disable any group promotion on the first reward and enable it on the second reward. That should hold off any group upgrades until they reach the $50 mark for their total donations.
Open acp > theme editor > collections > front > view > view.
Add your advert before
{{if settings.css_enable_comments AND member.group['g_css_view_comments']}}
I'll have to log this and take a look again. If your site is available for testing, please let me know and I can send through some test code when I've got something.
Make a note in the tracker and will see what can be done to improve it. Extracting an image from the news entry shouldn't be an issue. And I'll check if facebook can accept a snippet of the news entry rather then attempting to grab the description itself.
Check the menu manager and the "Url" value for the "Browse" menu item. It seems you'll need to update the url manually to reflect the new forums url now.
Yes full upgrade support for existing messages. You can view the upgrade guide from IPB 3.4 to IPB 4.x here - http://www.devfuse.com/forums/tutorials/article/165-upgrade-from-ipboard-34x/
I'm probably going to need acp and ftp to troubleshoot this as I don't have any issues like this. But here are a few things you can try and see what happens:
Disable all the alerts but the email one and manually run the task. Do you receive an email?
Try the "create own topic" setting and also "add post reply" and see if the different settings make a difference to topic creation.
From the IPB 3.4 version? No upgrade path because of the improvements I wanted to make in how the logos are loaded. But if you do have a large quantity of logos, I can put together a simple bit of code to import the previous logos.