Running back into the time when Janet was Sniper Joe is weird. And Various Nonsense, I remember when it was civil, though most people were in the upper boards then, but slowly migrating downwards towards it since DF 2010 wouldn't be released for a while. Things slowly got out of hand, too many topics, forum games and serious discussions taking place on the same page, roll to dodge migrating here from the IVAN forums, so the split was necessary. Prolly one of the best things to happen to the forums, but VN itself pretty much existed for nonsense threads at that point, hell, that was what the forum users asked for. It just became apparent that it served very little purpose, and while there were some good threads, the bad drowned it out. So it was locked, and it was still bad enough that regular users can't see it anymore, though Toady put off deleting it since some people wanted to be Archivists. Not sure if anything came from that, at that point I figured it wasn't worth the patience to go dig through the bad to find the gems.
Though heh. There was a time when we didn't even have Avatars, or a lot of the fancier features here, it was pretty bare bones. Kinda funny, This account's 4 years old, but when you get down to it, it spent three quarters of it's time down here.