Aha that would be horrid. All those hours of work gone like a poof of smoke. My friend accidentally TTed a year because it was New Years night and she forgot to change it back to the previous year. Her town was a mess so she ended up restarting luckily she had only just started a few days prior to it.
I have no clue. At least we'd all know how we could get a quick profit though. But yes, I'm sure that many would leave the forum and maybe only a few would try to recover their hard work if that actually happened.
I have 1200 hours in the game and I've lost 4 copies of Wild World. I'm uber paranoid about losing my town. I don't even hack bells or anything onto the game because that would ruin it, but in the event the game gets lost, erased, blows up, gets abducted by aliens, it was worth every penny.