Yes, but they only make money from like, ads and donations. You COULD run a forum off of donations if the goal was just to have a small place where regulars talk, but thats not the goal of Resetera, which is to milk as much money from ads from non posters as possible. They have not realized that the retard troons and seething negros aren't the actual draw for the owners, its people from off site searching google for stuff about zelda or wukong or whatever and being served up resetera threads to read.
If the owners closed all the nonsense topics about trannies and black pride they would probably actually have more appeal and make more money, but its too far gone at this point. Its why they CAN private those topics, theyre actually the least important ones no one cares about except for us to make fun of them with