So I have been jonesing for some good, old-fashioned WoW, so after shopping around the last two weeks, I settled on the Elysium Project. This is the "successor" to Nostalrius, and the server group that Nostalrius sent all of their source code to before they closed down. The community seemed pretty nice, they had PvP and PvE Servers that had decent population, and things were going well.
Then I tried to check their forums today and found everything was closed. I checked the facebook group and found this post:
http://Lightshope.org
So, the TL;DR is that some crooked server admins had been absconding with server donations, while also generating in-game gold for gold-selling services, as well as running a "hush hush" character copying service where people could pay money to have any character someone else had copied and given to them. This was happening the most on the PvP server with top level Arena players.
This is definitely a saddening thing, when people use the good will of others to abscond with funds for personal reasons and abuse their positions to make money. Makes me glad that I am here on SCB and with such a great group of people and leadership who are transparent.
Cheers all, and be wary when getting too invested in private servers!
Added info
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=10&v=bj9Eb1IdwdQ
Additional info: Appears that there will be an "Elysium" and a "Lights Hope" now. The "clean" staff split off from the Elysium project and took all the server information with them in order to start up a clean environment server system. Elysium may come back up as originally done, but who knows what'll happen from there.