The financial burden has never come up in moderator chat. I’m not sure how much it runs, but it couldn’t be much. When I ran my own, we hosted it on a local server and just the yearly registration fee. Less then 20 a year.
People also want to have a “voice” when contributing money or have expectations of what should happen. I just don’t think that would be in the best interest of the site.
As far as the suggestions, chat rooms carry a ton of bandwidth with them. They can quickly bog down the rest of the site. And for the type of content that is shown and are requirements to only give out contact info in private messages, we can’t just allow the general public. That could turn into a huge issue. Remember, we have minors here too. Last thing we need is someone that wouldn’t ever be here hitting on a 14 year old user or something. This is also why we already have discord for people just to chat.
All in all, it’s running pretty smooth and we’ve talked about a few things within our moderator section. Don’t worry about the site going down anytime soon.
I would like to counter, if I may.
People may want to have such a voice, but it is not required to acquiesce such a request. Donating money is just that, a donation. You can offer some rewards for donating, but that is entirely optional and is not required (nor very appropriate here). I do think you have a point about some people's expectations, though.
The idea for the chat room was not intended to be a feature on the site, rather a completely different site entirely. The idea is to create an entirely new site for people to chat about naturism without the personal information of the users of this site. This allows the distance of not openly advertising the site, and allows the moderators to have a method of filtering out the ne'er-do-wells on that site. People with genuine interests would search for this site, eventually (probably, although this could be a trouble spot the more I think about it), and create an account. The motivation is to try and advertise naturism and to encourage people to visit this forum, without getting the site swamped with requests. It is important to keep what little ground has been won, in this regard, in my opinion.
But, I'll leave it to the admins and mods. I was just tossing an idea about, tis' all.
P.S. stay warm yeall. My room is very cold...