Lie.... how could you be here since 98 if you were registered under goatboy since 05. You are lying about previous accounts.
OK, since this was never really answered for you in depth- and I doubt you catch on quickly.
The old board, you did NOT register under a handle and post as we do today. You could change names with every post. There were no real threads as we see today. You had a subject, then people replied to that. The entire board would scroll diagonally from left to right and back again if it was long enough, with many replies.
IP's were shown to the public eye, but after a few caught onto that, it wasn't a big deal as they got around that issue. That's how the Tom Prince/Craig Titus fight started. Someone posted as Craig, and Prince responded thinking it was him....because someone was able to use Craigs name just by typing it in, much like a new subject line for an email.
Once the board was up and running in the current style, I believe it was either hacked, or deleted a few times. I know a couple of times after the board crashed a few people were able to access the mod forums while still not being mods.
You could delete your own account too. VikingPower was the King of this. He'd amass 10k and then bomb his account. Rake up another 10-15k and again, kill it. Sometimes he'd be banned and come back under another name (sandycoosworth, clubber lang VP1 VP2 etc...). I'm not sure, but I think Bast did this numerous times and just added another number to his name after every new account was created (maybe after banning, again, unsure). Geo was another who would get banned and/or delete his account regularly.
VP, Goatboy, Osnard007, Juijitsu, Geo, Slipped Disk, Knny and a few others were all here many many years ago. Long before you probably picked up a weight. Then came guys like Dan-O, ProteinFarts! (aka Toxic Avenger), BigWiggs, and so forth. QuakerOats/Squad/Mirz/sarcasm was here during this period, but if he was here during the initial reign, he was under another name and had a much lesser ostentatious approach to things.
All the others that came after were just following the real show.