A few things should probably be cleared up. If I remember correctly, the donations started in mid-to-late 2011 and very few donators were added after 2012. When I got my Donator status I think the price was in the $4-7/coin range or so. It really wasn't that big of a deal at the time to have a Donator account, as evidenced by the sheer number of people from 2012-2015 that had Donator or VIP accounts and eventually attempted to scam others. It looks like the site has been surviving on its general revenues ever since, however most of the money was used to create a new forum software after being held for a long period of time and the value accumulated.
There were only two Donator-status users (to my knowledge) who were very vocal in the negative about their donations being used for new forum software, however these two and many other Donator-status members were asking/telling theymos to use the money on *something* at various points in the history of the forum as well, so they were seemingly being hypocritical about it, at least to me. Ever since then we've seen the occasional person here complaining about how theymos spends the money, but it's never been anyone who has donated. There might be other donators than the two who were most vocal who have been upset since, but no one's bothered to comment. It's hard to justify complaining about how a charity/non-profit uses your money once you've donated.
Some of us just gave because it made sense at the time, the accumulation in fiat value and eventual selling to work on forum software seemed like a well-timed market transaction in hindsight. We do have the new software, epochtalk. It's maybe arguable that it was "worth" it, but given that the original value raised was in the single digit thousands the fact we were able to fund essentially a new nodeJS forum software is nice. (
http://epochtalk.org/)
The total amount of money donated is significantly less than 9.2k BTC, or so I was fairly certain of. A good chunk of that was/is revenues as well. I'm quite sure that donations do not account for the entirety of that 9226 BTC.
