The board theory stuff I am talking about has less to do with "this is the way this forum is" and more to do with "why is this forum the way it is." Anyone who has been posting here, or at least in the off-topic zone, has an awareness of the fact that this forum is a fairly personable place, whatever. The amount of people who know each other by name here is to me at least fairly atypical of most message boards, but it is definitely the way it is, here.
I think part of it, and a part we don't think about at least anymore, is that this board is to some extent a spiritual successor of Dumbrella. Not entirely, because Dumbrella doesn't even exist anymore, but the first people who registered here were all Dumbrella boarders, because Jeph was and they followed him over to support him in his new endeavor. I think a lot of the personability of this forum is actually a side effect of taking cues from that board, at least on the part of the people who were responsible for board culture in those earlier days.
The relationships on this board have a lot to do with that, I think. The fact that we all met each other early on, either through like, Comic-Con or just random board meet-ups, or me showing up at your house while I was traveling, or when Tanya came and met me at Coachella... there's a lot of reasons, and I don't think we would have interacted with each other that way if there hadn't been a precedent set for it on this other forum so many of us read. And obviously the fact that we have broken bread together, gotten drunk together, makes it kind of silly to then call everyone by their forum names. I have people I know from real life on hipinion, or people I've met, but there's no chance I'd ever refer to them by first name on that board.