The forums themselves are actually handled by a third party and I believe are self sufficient from advertising, though I might be wrong on that front. A few years ago when the club was getting all of its finances in order we made the decision to do that as we wanted to make sure that this site kept running, as odd as that may sound. There was just too much good info here to risk losing it, so we wanted to hand it over to a more stable entity at the time.
Club dues pretty much just go towards the general expenses of the club, which include the membership packets and insurance primarily. We hope to one day get back to doing larger events, but the goal would be for those to be self sufficient as much as possible. I don't personally think it's fair for one person's membership dues to pay for another person's event stuff, but you often need downpayments to reserve venues and stuff like that, which dues money could potentially cover until it gets paid back by attendees of an event.
