The gift subscription plugin was broken by the recent upgrade to the vBulletin version. If you have submitted a gift subscription that did not work correctly please send an email to webmaster@straightdope.com with the details. Include your username and the username of the person you were giving a gift subscription too. I’ll make manual changes to apply the gift.
For the time being I’ve disabled the ability to give gift subscriptions until I have time to analyze the old plugin and determine what is needed to get it to work on the new version.
Jerry