The Four Horsemen of the Bulletin Board Apocalypse are:
1. The Conqueror : Defined as the point at which the Administrator actually awards the status of GoD to an individual whose only significant contribution to the forum was a chronic case of keyboard diarrhea.
2. War: The point at which the moderators have lost all control and the administrator has also lost interest in his own creation.
It is further exemplified by the Barbarians at the gate: Trolls and spammers whose only purpose is to annoy or to ruin another's good time.
One of the first signs of the prophesy coming to pass are when the html signatures and avatars continually dwarf and incite more intrigue than actual post content.
Sometimes however, war rides into the community as ego driven smear campaigns where intrigue and bitter infighting seeks nothing but to characterize and assassinate.
3. Famine: Interminable boredom.
The point at which there's nothing left to talk about.
Where anyone new who has a question about something is mercilessly flamed and directed to a post a year old, because the person who has the answer imagines that he is far too important to be bothered by such trivialities.
It is at this crossroad that the forum stops being a fun place for the dissemination of information and is transformed into a type of bulletin board Coliseum, where n00bs and heretics are thrown to the lions for the entertainment of that forum's embittered Royals.
The reason for this transformation is that the members are hungry.
They are hungry for topics of actual substance--- they want to have fun again.
But now there is so little subject matter of actual interest and such crappy moderation, that out of sheer apathy even respected members become cannibals and join in the frenzy of eating each other.
4. Death: It is the point where the forum or the site has not only lost its purpose and sense of direction, but it actually begins to rot from the inside.
While the old members have gotten used the stink, the new members are taken aback by it and driven out by its vapors.
Usually the only people who hold on to such a forum are the relatives in denial, who continually cling to the hope that a corpse already being devoured by immature l33t speaking rats, nerds, and anti-social maggots, will miraculously raise from the dead.
Good moderation can keep all these ominous things from coming to pass.
It is the job of an administrator and his moderators to effectively deal with such predators quickly and mercilessly.
It is also their duty to pretty much leave the rest of the membership the hell alone.
In other words, the less rules the better.
But since we live in a litigious society, there are those who because of youth or societal inexperience lack common sense or in any case like to push the limits of it.
