Those are all incomplete descriptions.
Way back when, the forum was a lot different (anyone remember back when NO one had avatars?).
The general discussion, creative projects, life advice, and forum games sections didn't exist. Instead, everything that wasn't directly related to video gaming went into various nonsense (if memory serves, a few people claimed that other games was supposed to be restricted to B12 projects too).
VN was, at this time, a combination of all kinds of stuff. Political discussion, some of the older forum games, and nonsense (threads that were mostly spam). Eventually, there got to be enough forum games for Toady to split them off. Then issues started popping up between serious VN stuff, and the unserious spamish things. There were lots of different suggestions going on right now ( I suggested, more than once, that we have a board for serious things, and one for unseriousness). Eventually, the spamish stuff got to be pretty bad for drifting into serious topics.
About now, Toady created the boards like you see now, he added Gen. disc, Creative projects, and life advice. However, this left VN with only, well, crap left. I still posted there a lot. However, two major movements started rising. First we had the penguins. Inaluct (who is still muted, right?) started making cute penguin avatars for anyone who wanted one (mine had a trench coat and rifle). They got really popular. Before long, there were two clear groups. Penguins and others. Several of the Pengs were outspokenly aggressive in trying to find converts, and several of the others were aggressively anti-penguin.
We also had the baron of the forum, were Aqizzar was elected. More than one person was against this (we had an . . . interesting, series of comics relating to his assassination). Before long, we had several different political movements in addition to the pengs. The board got all fucked up with LOTS of spamish posts. About now, I said, fuck this, and moved most of my posting here. Then I went out of town for a few days ( I think, I didn't look at VN for a while at least). When I checked again, Toady had locked it.
There we have the history of VN. If you want to see why it was locked, just read some of its threads.