The old forum wasn't exactly all peaches and cream either. I decided to click back to a random page (which was pretty much around the same time as the one you linked to) and I found some scary things. For instance, the subject of someone's post was "I HAVE A WEB PAGE!!!!!", and I have doubts that she would allow herself to post a subject like that anymore. Even more shocking was that one of RinkWorks' most loved and charished regulars posted this message,

"i haven't seen sam anywhere since new years eve! he hasn't changed the pole, been in chat, fixed 1/1/100 bug, or posted ANYTHING!!! where oh where could old sammy boy be?!? I believe he was not Y2K compliant and dissapeared along with him computer and toaster."

This was posted only three threads up from the previous one I mentioned. It wasn't even deleted. Not only that, but no one even said anything making fun of him for posting it. I can say with a pretty good amount of confidence that if this was posted now-a-days, it wouldn't be treated the same, although I'm sure a good bit of you wish you were around to flame this guy into submission right at the beginning and stop it right there. A third random post I clicked on was this:

"Just reading the IABBBBM review of Flash Gordon, in which the reviewer used the word "manky" which Sam didn't understand.
This is one of those adjectives which can't really be defined. Manky is the way the cheese on your pizza looks when it goes cold. Manky is the feeling you get when you wake up after having slept in your clothes and shoes and you didn't brush your teeth the night before. If you've read any books by Terry Pratchett, the character Corporal Nobby Nobbs, if he was an adjective, would be manky. I don't think I can define it any better than that."

And this one had 70 replies to it. My overall point with this message is to show that better doesn't neccesarily mean more mature, or more grammatically correct, or even more interesting, and it doesn't require that we dig deep in to the bag of acceptable cocktail party banter. Not that those things can't be good, but it seems to me that what really made the forum good back then was the open-mindedness to what everybody else was saying. People would respond to posts that had horrible spelling and what's not generally accepted as 'intellectual' topics just as readily as they would to the more classy posts. It was rarely the original post in a thread that made it interesting, it was normally something stemming from all the replies to that post. Or at least that's what it looks like from my short little tour in to the past. They took themselves less seriously than everybody around here seems to be trying to. I don't know when the big 'race to become the best Rinkie' started, but it was probably around the invention of ops. Up until then everybody was more or less equal, but now there were people here that you were supposed to be more like, so you were. Then they tried to act more like the general op population was supposed to, more responsible, less crazy. Now that everyone's maturity level was kicked up a notch, everyone who just happened to stop by looked bad in comparison. But I don't really know, I'm just making things up. The only thing I'm sure of is that somehow it's someone else's fault.