What would you do if the forum had a subscription fee (to post classifieds, etc)?

I completely agree with a fee - however, it should be totally transparent. If you start to make a profit then you should say so. Truthfully, I would rather not give money to a forum if it is flush or to you personally when there are so many great charities out there.

Do you expect all of the time, effort, skill and experience I put in this to be free, forever and always for you to use and profit from?

I don't claim any right to turn a penny into a pound... I have no such right, I got into this through the love of it and not from desire to make money (I could put my effort into many other projects if that was the motive).

The site has been bootstrapped and run with love since inception. But if there is a chance that one day I might be able to treat myself to something and feel the warm glow that the hours, days and months put into this paid me back personally... then I'm afraid I'm going to do it, and I would rather hope that should such a time actually come around (and I'm not holding my breath on it), then the feeling would be that I thoroughly earned it.

That's no motive for wanting the forum to be comfortably self-funding, but in no way am I daft enough to say no to it ever happening.

I can't see the forum being profitable, sometimes it's comfortably off (last summer we had 6 months worth of money in the bank), but mostly it survives hand to mouth. Having survived on a shoestring for so long, any profit it did manage to scrape I would probably be too afraid to touch in case the forum needed it in the future.