What if the donators get tired and do not donate anymore, how would the moderators be able to be paid?
The forum doesn't live out of donations.
theymos does ad rounds almost bi-weekly (
last one) for the ads you sometimes see under the threads. In the last one, he got 0.63 BTC (for ~12+ days).
And he probably has some spare amount saved.
Sometime i feel that forum is missing a lot of funds by not using google ads. With the sort of traffic, this forum generates, google ads could generate a lot of revenue for the forum, but then it will not remain as clean as it is now.