Those of us who have some experience with large-scale websites know that ASPD's ongoing financial woes and technical issues were largely self-inflicted.

A site with ASPD's traffic (1000-1500 unique viewers at any given time) is fairly substantial, but it's also not terribly unique. Web hosting for a normal site of that traffic would be around $750 a month, I'd estimate. A current vBulletin license is $500 for the most top of the line version. Add another $2000 or so for a consultant's time to import all the previous data, implement the various tools in place, etc. This adds up, but with ASPD's customer base, is easily doable.

Now the fly in this particular ointment is ASPD's legal status. Obviously this is something that the new administrators were worried about. And whether or not a site is 100% legal, finding a reputable web hosting service that will accept its business without question is another matter entirely. Not to mention finding a consultant you can trust to work on vBulletin, SQL, etc while moving gigabytes of data involving, um, active fantasy lives. This may have been driving much of ASPD's most recent decisions, and a failure to deal with them may well explain why they finally closed up shop.

In any event, there were, I'd say, a great many technically knowledgeable people (not just myself) available that the new owners could have gotten advice and assistance from, were they not too busy with "forum dramaz" and alienating most of the people who might have been willing to help.