Been a while since I've visited here and I have to say dave, I'm not inclined to believe that you're going to listen to the information you solicit here. MANY times in the past you've asked for advice and then ignored it, doing whatever the hell you want, often moving in the exact opposite direction of the majority of suggestions, and always to the detriment of this forum.
You have two major problems, craige:
1) The market has shifted. By and large people know how to identify fakes, and the majority of people who are interested in the type of fashion this website USED TO BE about have moved on. It's not like there's hundreds of thousands of jeans freaks that you have yet to uncover that will join and contribute. This comes back to, I hate to say it (having raised the issue like 6 million times already), the forum's mission statement. The REAL mission statement (I suspect) was "To make me some money so I don't have to hold a 9-5 job" but you've experimented with LOTS of ideas in the past: A place to find wholesale authentic jeans, a place to help people identify real jeans and educate them, etc. Now you have nothing. It's not really clear what the ACTUAL PURPOSE of this forum is anymore, which is why nobody comes.
2) You don't delegate. If you want to rule the place with an iron fist, that's your choice but I think it's pretty obvious that it doesn't lead to a successful forum (let alone a profitable one for you personally). But from a practical perspective, you cannot drop off the face of the planet and go live in a hut in some third-world country and expect unpaid volunteers who don't agree with your philosophy to continue to adhere to it let alone enforce it with the vigor that you would.
Solutions? I will address item 2 first because the solution is easier:
2) Stop managing the content of the forum. You just have to let this go. I know that you don't like when people disagree with you or with one another, but you know what? That's life. People are not monolithic in their viewpoints and attempting to chorale all discussion even remotely adversarial into "drama" does not change anything. Nor does attempting to force your own beliefs onto others. Maybe it works in church, but not on the internet. Hire someone to be the forum content manager (or leader or deacon or whatever the fuck you want to call it) and step back. Just worry about your ads, and your forum functionality, and your servers and bandwidth and let someone else handle policy. You're doomed to a ghost-town otherwise. I'm unconvinced that it's not too late already.
1) This is a tough one. I've thought about this in the past and have only come up with half-formed ideas. Given my previous attempts to make you understand the importance of this task (you finding a disclaimer that the website belongs to the admin and all content belongs to him) has been AT BEST an abject failure. But if you want to succeed you have to re-engineer the purpose of this place, stick to it, and measure it to make sure that you can make corrections if needed. These ideas of changing around the forum topics are approaching that, but those are the trees. I'm telling you that you need to arrange this by looking at the forest.
The fact that your first priority is buying new hardware to host the site doesn't exactly give me high hopes. Most of the development work you've done even has been to the detriment of the users. Remember the old mall? How quickly have sales dropped off? Remember when you were on PHPBB and you spent a ton of money to make another platform look JUST LIKE PHPBB? Did that solve anything? Did it increase your user base? Did it help functionality?
What is the most successful combination forum/market on the internet? Craigslist. And do they have a fancy website with a javascript mall and all kinds of bells and whistles? NO! They have plain-text, no CSS, incredibly bare-bones implementation. But their system is FAST, uncensored, well-organized, unmoderated, and WILDLY successful.
I'm not sure that any amount of cajoling on my part will be able to open your mind to the problems of this place because having known you for 5 years, my feeling is that they are reflective of your own personal shortcomings.
Maybe I'll close by quoting the late great michael jackson: "If you want to make the world a better place, take a look at yourself and make that change."
