Being a "Real life friend" doesn't necessarily apply of being a good moderator. Also the forum will not be active as new staffers will come along to clean the whole boards.
The forum itself is dead, the whole community has left due to Nick's irresponsibility of fulfilling the members opinions and suggestions and the whole thing of being innactive.
The boards are dead due to the fact that they are old, only a couple are active and this is because of people failing to try to open their server since L2J made it so easy for them, eventho they fail to read a proper topic to do so.
If nick wants more money to squeeze out of this forum, he should fix it himself, remove all the boards and do a fresh start, make a proper advertisement to other websites and ask people for their opinions on the subject. Imo he is not willing to do so since he's over the "Forum making" thing that he had back in 2005/6, the only year that the forum was partially active was 2008 with him innactive.
Even the error that is comming up every now and then is retarded, he hasn't fixed it up yet nor paid a developer to do it for him so he won't spent more than 10 minutes on it, yet again it cause more people to leave.
Edit: Even when I posted this reply I've got an error after 30 seconds of delay.
121k members is just a number, the community itself is innactive. I get more activity on my partial website with 28 members in a day than this forum gets in a week.
My 2 cents.