there's only a few truly active private servers, im on one of them, Icecrown WOTLK on Warmane. A word of warning through, the queues are nigh impossible to deal with, hours long, so if you aren't willing to donate 10 euros to bypass it forever it's really hard.

pic i just snapped of trade district, 12,000 online atm, altho that number seems faked, dalaran pop is so high it lags even my haswell i5 and sometimes crashes so try not to stay there long.
if you do decide to play here be sure to download the (old) client, the default one they cooked up with WoD models and shit is buggy as fuck
pros of high pop:
-auction house is well stocked
-not hard to find groups for anything
-lots of people to meet ofc
-wpvp everywhere all the time
cons:
-lags and server goes down a few times per day
-barrier to entry is kind of high, if you're pve it is hard to break that 4.8-4.9k EoT gs barrier via pugs due to requirements being high (5.3-5.5+ even for icc10n) so you should find a cool guild or try to snake your way into all the alt runs you can. Prepare to farm gold for BoE icc epics if you want to meet those requirements otherwise.
-hard to farm world mats
I don't know why you'd want to play on Dalaran Wow unless you are just a raidlogger.
I recommend Horde for PvE and Alliance for PvE+PvP, both sides are very active anyway.
Quote (MakinClouds @ Sep 21 2017 01:13am)
Not private servers :^)
thats why they all get taken down
lolmane isnt going anywhere. Nost killed itself with its unsustainable business model, or rather, lack of one. The people running it just decided blaming it on the C&D letter they get every month from blizz (which Warmane also gets just as often) was better than taking responsibility for their failure and Blizz looks like the bad guy even tho they are merely doing the bare minimum required by copyright law to keep their IP.
The only server I remember being explicitly taken down was Wowscape, because they fucked up hard by hosting it in the US. Even if Blizz chose to pursue legal action, they'd have to get across the international barrier, and Warmane plans to move to other countries and change hosts as needed. It would be like playing whack-a-mole and it wouldn't be easy once they moved to Russia. On top of there being nothing to really gain for Blizz in the first place, we can safely say this will continue until it dies out.
This post was edited by DCSS on Sep 21 2017 12:34pm