Someone please correct me if I'm wrong on either of those points.
You are not wrong. According to
mexxer-2 post from 2016, a portion of the 25% of the bitcoin the forum generated through ads was intended for mod payments according to a formula. If the formula is correct, the most active moderators earned 0.3% or more per month, each. This was confirmed by Quickseller further down in the thread.
As far as I can tell, the percentage is now higher than 25%. The ad auctions are not bringing in much bitcoin right now and the forum has grown enough to need a lot of mods. My guess is that the mods get nearly all of the forum ad revenue and hosting is paid for out of the forum’s reserves.
Do you really think so? From what I can recall mods get paid around 1000-2000$ a month on a normal basis if they handle a certain portion of reports. I am not sure if this is still the case though. Mods get paid in terms of how many reports they relatively handle. Ref:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5294865.msg55717644#msg55717644OTOH, I came across this:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=234009.msg2480445#msg2480445 which basically proves the forum had more than 6000 BTC in funds.
More links regards to mod payments:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5265166.msg54889130#msg54889130