Well, the site a long long long time ago was a message board with the old school outline style board. I wasn't one of the "so-called" originals, I've been around awhile, but it goes back quite a ways, and when it switched from message boards to forums the people who were on the original board, their start date was erased and set to the date they were attached to the forum, so they lost some time on their date.
As with any growth, in comes people who don't want to contribute and just screw around, there seems to be more of that here lately, but it's still pretty informative. I have noticed, probably in the last 6 months, a lot of the old-timers are logging on more infrequently and that might be party why, due to a lot of young punks just screwin around.
But when it goes down, you see how many people go nuts, so they're are a lot of die hards.