You probably could have gotten away with organizing under a 501c7 and set up a donation link on your site. You wouldn't be directly charging your users for access (as was against your agreement), you'd be giving your user-base a way to assist you with the operational costs of the site. If enough of your users found a substantial enough value in what your site offered, you would have been paid, even if you had to periodically send out help requests.
You could also have taken advantage of affiliate programs as I once did and display those links. I found that they quite often managed to get around AdBlock simply because they were generally static images or gifs located locally with a href pointed straight to an affiliate page on that remote site. The site would operate exactly as if the user went to the remote site's main URL, but depending on the affiliate agreement they had, you'd get paid a few cents for the user making the initial click, and if they bought anything through your affiliate link, they'd cut you a check for a small percentage of what that user spent
The community site I had back then made more than enough to cover monthly and yearly hosting costs using the affiliate method, though I concede that at its most popular I didn't have nor need more than 4 servers (one DB server, 3 redundant web servers) behind the domain. I also didn't have to go the 501c7 route since the site wasn't considered large enough to be more than a hobby. The site and community collapsed more for political reasons than financial (several of us got tired of the bullshit from trolls and felt it better to disband entirely).
Hindsight is 20/20, but there were ways you could have made money to support the site without necessarily resorting to ads that Adblock would have been able to block.