Yeah, I run Wario Forums as a community for a very specific and somewhat underrated video game series (<a href="https://warioforums.com" rel="nofollow">https://warioforums.com</a>). To answer the questions:<p>1. I use XenForo. After vBulletin went down the tubes, I discovered XenForo as a replacement, and have found no reason to switch to anything else.<p>2. Generally, the moderation isn't too much of an issue, since I have a fair few anti spam measures set up on the registration form, including questions specific to the forum topic, plus a dedicated team of moderators and a niche subject matter. The odd troublemaker that gets in will get banned quickly enough anyway.<p>Maintenance is a little tougher, but the software doesn't get that many updates all things considered, and they've been painless so far.<p>3. You see, for me monetisation isn't really a priority, so I just have a few ads and a paid membership system, and leave it at that. The site exists because I think it needs to, not because I see it ever becoming a business or self sustaining.<p>But if you do want to monetise, then it depends how big you expect it to be. Ads pay terribly, especially for community sites (probably because places like Facebook/Twitter/Reddit/etc offer a better deal there), so you're probably going to want a mix of donations and sponsorships if you want to keep the lights on. The former alone is good enough for a small forum or one with a very loyal community, the latter is probably a necessity if you end up needing dedicated servers or cloud services like AWS to keep it online.