с учетом частого обсуждения темы " а вот бы нанять модеров за деньги" можно сделать вывод, что все-таки они работают на общественных началах.

А в свою очередь с чего вы взяли что они работаю за плату?

I posted an estimate like that a long time ago, but it was an estimate as of that time, not a guaranteed amount. The mod payments algorithm has never taken forum income into account whatsoever, and you can see that in 2015 and 2016 it was much higher than 25%.

The increased-value reserve and massive 2017 income (which may well have been just a weird temporary trend) came pretty suddenly. I'm not sure yet how best to handle it. I've been thinking of maybe allocating some of the money toward creating a registered non-profit which would have a similar mission as the forum, but would focus more on things like free-speech legal battles and the development of true decentralized forum software. I also need to figure out ways of delegating more, since I am absolutely swamped as things are right now. Perhaps I could hire someone with a business degree or something who can act more like a proper CEO. Suggestions publicly or via PM are welcome, but please focus more on structural improvements rather than lists of things to throw money at. This has already been the case to a large extent, but especially now, the limiting factor is mostly time/people/skill/trust rather than money.

I haven't finished with 2015 yet.

2014 is as follows:

I'm behind on the accounting. 2015 is basically done, but I need to double-check it and apply the results of taxes (even when there's a net loss, there may be capital gain taxes). 2016 is still very incomplete: I've had to do half of the work in order to pay taxes, but I basically need to go through everything again to figure out forum balances. Sloppy, I know, but I've been disincentivized to spend many hours figuring it out exactly because the reserves so obviously exceed the expenses. There's currently about 1250 BTC(+BCH) in reserve.

Keep in mind that if I make an accounting mistake, almost certainly the result of this will be that I pay forum expenses out of my own pocket accidentally. The income is almost all very obvious/public, and I have to list all of the expenses that I temporarily paid out of pocket in order to be repaid from the forum income or reserves. So it's very unlikely that I would take too much money.

Here are approximate numbers.

Tax is not included for 2017. Because bitcointalk.org is tax-wise a disregarded entity, it's difficult for me to calculate the tax costs attributable to forum activities. I'll do it some other day.