Once upon a time, RPGCodex was a place for hardcore RPG fanatics. The sort of guys that felt like self-harm whenever the words "RPG Elements" were uttered. There were design discussions, huge arguments about games, features, etc. It was incredibly nerdy, but awesome.
The genesis of the site I'm not too sure about, but I do know the founders were the kind of guys that preferred heated topics to be discussed heatedly.
Then Oblivion came out. The staff of the forum hated it. They'd loved Morrowind, and Oblivion was just a generic piece of shit compared to it. Being prone to heat and anger, that led to a bunch of making fun of / lambasting the development team at Bethesda. Particular targets were Todd Howard (a complete bumbling retard, according to the RPGCodex) and Pete Hines (a snakeoil salesman bathed in pure evil). People at the Bethesda Forums started seeing all these links to extremely critical and vitriolic articles, and they did something foolish: they banned all discussion of the RPGCodex, and they autoreplaced any mention of the site to something else. This had the inevitable effect that any moron that got banned from the beth forums, or that hated the games, or that heard of this mythic place where people could curse at developers and be so effective that the devs had to lock any mention of you, did the obvious thing: joined the RPGCodex.
This had an impact on the site. The vitriol remained and intensified, the quality of the discussion went down, and the site went from being its own place, where indie RPG Devs could come and chat about their games, where nostalgia for a certain kind of old-school RPG ruled, etc to an attack site, where disgruntled asshole could come and talk about how new dev studios were all retards catering to stupid console kiddies.
At the same time, there were a couple changes of staff. Originally the site's content was driven by 3 people: Saint Proverbius, Exitium (later Sol Invictus of QT3 Infamy, now Sol Invictus the nice feminist ally that runs gameranx) and Vault Dweller (now the dude working on the maybe-one-day-game Age of Decadence). Saint vanished, Exit got kicked out, and VD kinda took over the site. The previously more tech-focussed admins DarkUnderlord and Calis also started on the content side, in a lesser capacity.
At this time, things were schizophrenic. The site's content was critical and abrasive, but smart and measured. The forums were a cesspool already. Tacticular Cancer was created to be the strategy side of the codex, new people came in to work on it (including me).
Then.
One day a drunk asshole with admin powers gave an even bigger asshole the keys to the kingdom (for the lulz, obviously, because by this point the forums were indistinguishable from 4chan), which then proceeded to shit up the whole place. Vault Dweller came in, banned everyone involved, and tried to put it back to where it was, and (FINALLY) add some fucking rules to the chaos. He felt that since he was defacto The Codex, content-wise, it should be run according to his ideas. DarkUnderlord and Calis disagreed, they felt that the side of the Codex worth preserving was the chaotic, lulzy, mess rather than VD's attempt to become a legit site. They undid everything he did.
At this point, VD left to start the Iron Tower Studio forums, everybody rejoiced about the license to spew fecal matter out of every pore onto the Internet, and I decided to check out this quartertothree forum that the codex would occasionally mention in a disparaging way. They seemed more adult there, they actually seemed to enjoy games, and SURELY they would be MUCH less drama-prone than the mental midgets remaining at the RPGCodex.
So I created my account on qt3, "Abilio Carvalho".
It didn't go as I expected.
Now: Do not ever EVER ask me to remember the Codex days again.