Re: A thought about ULMF...
Elitism! Yay!
On the note of the forums not being the same, I completely agree. I think it stems from the nature of our posting culture, where a post in one thread has to be read to understand the humor in another for instance. This creates a need to read all the threads in order to not fall behind on humor and so on. Before that wasn't a problem, but now? Now there's a new post all the time, there are new worthy threads with activity in them popping up all over the place.
Will a council of older/senior/ high postcount/whatever help? Probably not in any other way than deterring more people from joining the forums, because they get scared off by the close-knit groups.
On the note of the hentai-section, there used to be actual dialogue going on there. There used to be humor and fun. Threads would derail and go on about something funny, while someone posted some hentai every now and again. Now it's industrialized hentai posting, bots, trash and mike's spamming and dumping. I've seen hentai posters rage on the fact that someone went off topic in their thread and didn't talk about their hentai.
No, the forum isn't what it used to be, there are some things that are keeping us close- knit, like the Jungle Girl remake, and the Lurker Wars, and such, but on the grand scale of things the actual problem is that. The scale. It's too hard to follow everything, and that puts us all further apart.
(This was one of the minor reasons I took a break, on top of IRL stuff.)