The future of the forum:

[Slaninar]

The lack of responses bar one person (Unfazed, thank you fella) for actual help (I don't mean advice), is quite frankly fucking disappointing.

With a similar scenario, I have managed to salvage our local motorcycling forum - but I did cut out the images as that allowed me to keep the storage and hence hosting and backup costs low. Donations are zero, and there are no adverts for now, but the costs are also close to zero so I can keep it running (though the starter/owner is paying for the domain registration renewal - and while I have the admin role for the technical side, I don't really do moderation/administration).

There, I got full access so I could see what I'm dealing with before taking it on so to speak (that was easy because we know each other personally so trust was not an issue).

Here, I'm not really sure what we're dealing with and what the options are.
For example: if the choice boils down to shutting it down and just removing images - then too bad for the images   (just the first, oversimplified example, it needn't be black and white).

Similar thoughts about the adverts - without insisting, if the costs are high, and no donations are existing (or reasonable to expect), do we rather let it be gone, or make a compromise?

I did mention Cloudflare before - it coud reduce server load and thus expenses, at the cost of the huge corproration being able to intercept and see the pigeon pics I send via PMs every now and then.   

I can't take moderation/administration burden - that part is not on the table.

My money and time are also limited, unfortunately.

Helping (and providing the "physical" infrastructure to a certain degree, for free) with hosting, backups, emails, DNS, security, updates - that's for consideration. 

I mean, I've done that before, am doing it with my and our motorcycling forums, so I suppose I could help with FOC too, at least to a degree.