And Larry has a good point, IMO. Wotmania always had the "Elders are god" problem and it drove away very many good people who couldn't stand up to it. Carry that culture over to a little-known site without established custom links and you hit problems straight away.

But you don't need me to tell you that.

I'd suggest working on polishing the look of the site, and doing more in the area of personalisation - on the web, it is no longer about "me and my friends" but "everyone out there" and focus appears to be shifting to semantics and richer content as well.
I can see the WotMB, for one, looking more like a widget-based page than a list of posts - people could organise the posts as they liked, in clearer order (say, top five "Great Hunt" posts in one box, top ten "Rand is A Sheep-Shagging Todger-Twitcher" posts in another.) This doesn't have to be complex, even a simple "personalise this page" option with a quick form to fill out some available options. Of course, javascript drag-and-drop functionality is fully sexy, but keeping it simple at first is possibly a better option for RAFO.

Just a thought.

From the perspective of the usability of the site I would suggest if someone could start throwing about some AJAX or such that would help with getting about the place - and surely more should be done with the wealth of information sitting around in the databases. This knowledge is power (not the True Power although that would be awesome!) and so much could be done with it to attract not only WoT-freaks seeking answers, but a broader sci-fantasy audience upon which to build a user-base (think Amazon "people who bought this also..." suggestions, or even a simple "hottest topics" etc.) Shallow data mining people!
Simple ideas could be added to assist in searches (think Google Suggest, the code for that is just incredibly simple) and why not get something going with an iGoogle widget (you could keep it simple by keeping it to Quote of the Day, or Daily Poll or some such). You can tie these things back to the site which in turn ups the hit-count which in turn attracts revenue in its way among other things.

In short, forums just ain't what they used to be, and it is the semantics that are beginning to matter.

I admit that I have not been visiting RAFO (Or wotmania before it) as often as I should, and have therefore possibly already missed some great conversation on this subject, but I hope my two cents isn't entirely useless. I also admit that I have merely vomited up these words without stopping to think about them so there is a strong possibility none of it makes sense or is of any use.
This was all merely my humble opinion, but I don't mind spreading it about.