Yes, YorkieTalk was started by fasteddie as well as Yoda's Mommy (who stays behind the scenes) almost two years ago. The first post was made on January 5, 2004. Here is the thread:
http://www.yorkietalk.com/forums/yor...1-welcome.html
The YorkieTalk Web server is currently located in the Los Angeles, CA area, thus we were affected by the LA power outages earlier this week. The group of people that run YorkieTalk now consists of several administrators, three moderators, and many others that donate their time and effort to writing guides or are active in our live YorkieTalk chat. Without our wonderful members, YorkieTalk would be nowhere as useful and popular as it is now. We appreciate each and every member. It pains us a great deal to suspend or ban any member, but we have tried to be rule-free in the past, but it was not very successful. We had total chaos when we had no rules.
Monthly costs vary per month, as our members use up quite a bit of bandwidth per month and especially since everyone likes to view Yorkie pictures. We do often have to hire technicians and database gurus to help when we have problems, which we do quite a lot with a site this large. We have already gone through three server upgrades because of how much YorkieTalk has grown, and it looks like we will be upgrading once again shortly. Web servers can be quite expensive to maintain. For privacy reasons, we prefer to keep any financial information private.
YorkieTalk will always continue to be a free site for members. It will continue to be free unless it somehow becomes financially impossible for us to run it. We appreciate all donations (large and small, as any donation helps) that are made by members. Donations are used to keep the site running and to also help add new features to YorkieTalk. They are not required nor expected of any member. We would never want someone that is financially strapped or in financial trouble to donate, as they have other pressing issues to deal with. If you do feel that YorkieTalk is worth donating to, please do donate. If not, that is fine, continue to enjoy YorkieTalk as you do now.
Thank you for the kind words, our goal here is to educate and share Yorkie information, pictures, and funny stories, of which every Yorkie owner has a few of. We thank you for being a member and hope that you enjoy being a part of this Yorkie community. If you are not enjoying YorkieTalk, we apologize, and would like to say there are other places for you around the Internet to discuss Yorkies and we hope that you find a place that you find more enjoyful.