The departures that took place in October due to the forum 'revolution', for lack of a better word, of all the bitching and fighting crybabies that polluted 60% of the board, effectively cut down on the size of that percentage, and ultimately prevented the forums from closure at that given time.
In other words, the board was heavily fragmented, so we did a defrag and wiped away all the garbage.
It went like this. The forums were great around 2001/beginning of 2002 because it wasn't fragmented yet. But you know how it goes, with active traffic, shit comes in, shit goes out, and before you know it, the place is a zoo. End '02/large part of '03, it was bad.
We were a little late with the defrag, and so lost a lot of good posters in the period of '02/'03. You couldn't see that in the numbers though, because the digital slots that were left behind by these good posters got filled with more junk (people) pooring in.
So you send in the clean-up crew to wipe away all the junk, and this is what you got left. A healthy functioning forum.
Gotta love those defrags.
Forums dead 
