Sorry, if I was unclear. Good comment! Much of the above included extraneous details as they occured/I thought of them, which merely ended up complicating things.
It appears that one is able to delete entire threads (that is, user-names can). This happened to me today, inadvertantly, when I attempted to delete a duplicate post of mine in the thread "Minor Issue, perhaps...". I deleted the duplicate post, and then the entire thread disappeared.
When the thread disappeared, it was simply gone without a trace from the Web Forum Hosting Forum (in which it had been). However, the appearance of this Forum on the Index was a bit bizarre, namely, you just saw a little arrow and the box. Just like the Open Free For All Forum looks now. There was no "latest post data," i.e. the name or guest and what time it had been posted.
This led me to conjecture that the reason the OFFA Forum looks the way it does is that someone tried to delete their post in the OFFA Forum, for whatever reason, and that the whole thread consequently disappeared. I based my conjecture on the identical appearance of the OFFA Forum and the Web Hosting Forum at that point in time. Namely, they both just had the little box with the arrow, and no latest post data. The Web Forum Hosting Forum has had posts since this event, so it again appears normal. As of this writing, the OFFA Forum has not had any new posts since this alleged deletion event, and one still sees the little box with the arrow and no latest post data.
To confirm my hypothesis, I went to the old IP-based site, which has an older version of the OFFA Forum, and compared page one (more would not have been necessary) of each version with one another. Sure enough, there was a thread missing from the newer version. This missing thread is titled "Focal Point Academy in Mesquite Nevada." It was started by a new user named "bearman" and to my knowledge, I believe this was his/her only post to date. As of the image archived on the IP-based site, there had been 4 views and no replies to this post. The post was originally made on March 14th, 2007, at 1:13 AM. The latest posting to this forum (on the IP-based site) was made later the same day at 4:08 AM in another thread. I added that latter piece of information as a potential piece of relative information: I do not know exactly when the IP-based site was archived.
The thought occured to me, and it may or may not be coincidental, that perhaps the reason I ended up wiping the entire thread in my own case had something to do with the fact that I was the original poster of that thread ("Minor Issue, perhaps.."). Perhaps bearman decided against leaving his/her post up inquiring about info on Focal Point and decided to delete his/her post, and consequently that particular thread was wiped off of Fornits. And leaving the strange appearance of the OFFA Forum on the Index.
The "Minor Issue, perhaps..." thread, coincidentally, was precisely about the strange appearance of the OFFA Forum on the Index (little box with the arrow and no latest post data). Perhaps, it turned out to be not such a minor issue after all.
Another issue I mentioned was that I had recently noticed some "test" threads which appeared in the OFFA Forum for a brief period after we had come back online (from a long time down). I couldn't find those threads anymore, and wondered whether their deletion had contributed or were just silently included in this entire scenario.
Hope I covered everything. Seem to think I may have missed something...
