Thanks, Hellboy. I get paid something on the order of €0.00 per day, with an equally generous weekly, monthly and yearly bonus.
Seriously, it's all voluntary. I'd have done the DB in any case since it is such a useful tool for mapmakers and modders and helps produce superior quality mods and greatly improved maps (due to precise control of what units to put where). And a sufficient number of maps and mods are what will keep the game going quite a bit past the point where it would naturally taper off.
We saw that happen with Dom2, it was slowly starting to decline (as measured by activity here, or as I saw it anyhow) despite a modest number of mods and a fairly good selection of maps. We had Sunray's unit list at that point, but it was incomplete, didn't have all the unit numbers and while useful, wasn't exactly what I was looking for at the time (when I was making the first draft of the Faerun map). So I made a new version and organized that into the Dom2 DB. I later got to see the source code for sites for Dom2, which is why the magic site section of the Dom2 DB is the most complete and accurate part of that documentation.
A side effect of me releasing the Dom2 DB was that suddenly we got a veritable explosion of mods and Zen's idea of the Complete Balance series of mods took on a life of its own almost and becamse an instant hit. After Zen left, quantum mechani took over that and has continued the project since.
Even before I had my own copy of Dom3, I knew that my first order of business would be producing a DB of the base game so that the community would have better to tools to make things happen sooner rather than later. If you were to look at the pace things have gone forward with Dom3 vs how quickly this happened with Dom2, you would find that the process has been significantly accelerated and knowing what mistakes not to repeat has speeded it up still more.
As for the bug list thing, let's just say that the Shrapnel staff made me an offer I couldn't refuse.
Ok, not the Godfather type of offer, but I was asked to tackle the bug thread and sorting the reporting issues out. I accepted for several different reasons and the shortlist thread and the stricter reporting guidelines are an outgrowth of that.
Edi