I read a post written by Heckler, then Wizkid and I started the forum at his place. When we moved from proboards to this forum, Heckler paid for a year or two. Then we moved to our current host, and I've covered expenses since. The donation feature was launched to help cover costs and develop the site further. Both jazznas and anothercheater were made site admin to deal with site design and upgrades. I don't remember if that was their trade or not, but at the time I had barely glanced at PHP, and I still know nothing about layout and web graphics.