Paying someone to migrate the site to something modern might be cost prohibitive. But there are plenty of MetaFilter users who have the expertise and would happ

Paying someone to migrate the site to something modern might be cost prohibitive. But there are plenty of MetaFilter users who have the expertise and would happily pitch in to move the site to a modern open source stack. But for years the MetaFilter policy was "we can't accept volunteer labor because (mumble mumble legal something)." So hopefully they'll eventually decide "the fact that programmatic changes take forever is killing us" and do whatever is necessary to make volunteer labor possible. I guess they could also let volunteers work on ColdFusion, but they might not get many takers.