however a LS group is just that.. a group nothing more. Free companies are guilds and guilds are what have Always driven communities forward in games.
That's completely irrelevant in the context of this thread. Anyone who posts here for the intended purpose of this thread is asking to recognize them and the 7 other people with them. People who peruse this thread will see that a group of 8 players under a common name did stuff before another group of 8 players could do their stuff under their common name.

People recognize guilds, people don't recognize groups. It isn't any more complicated than that. You don't see people talking about X persons group..you see people talking about Blue Garter.
It's semantics. If Blue Garter had formed using the in-game linkshell feature rather than the in-game free company feature, then their means of communication would be /ls1 rather than /fc - Their world first fame would still be there under that same name - just under a different in-game feature. This game is unique to other mmo's in that it has these two redundant features. They serve the same purpose, for the most part - so having some awkward distinction between them under the banner of "building community" is just out there.

Sorry but one group of people doesn't do anything to bring the community together because no one has a chance of joining that one group of people outside one of their members quitting. People do however have the opportunity to join a Guild, and they do which is why guilds have always and will always be the major driving force behind community growth.
This what confuses me the most about the "community building" thing. If by growth you mean the growth of players inside a number of FC's, then there are much more productive means to accomplish that. The decision of whether a player want to interact with a certain FC has little to do with the function of this thread. No one looks to this thread to see potential FC's to join or to play with - the people who view this thread are the same people who contribute to it. The thread serves as a place for already-established groups to compete/trash talk/stroke epeens with each other at their own leisure.

I mean, if you haven't noticed, this thread hasn't done much, if anything at all, to shift the forum activity off of recruitment posts. No one cares about who did stuff before another group when they're trying to just find a group to do stuff with - and they're not going to look here to find the latter.

I made all these changes when I took over months ago.
Again, probably because no one cared, and most likely, no one still cares. As long as the thread maintained the premise of showing who did what with who at what time, you can insert your ideologies of religious fundamentalism into how your organize it if you wanted. The topic somehow came up among all the /popcorn, and there could potentially be some more popcorn depending on how try-hard your future responses are.