I don't think any of the current mods were modding when that happened so i'll take this question.

When the current ownership took over the site they disabled a hell of a lot of features.

The arcade went
The member list went
The who's online feature went (The one that tells you which threads people are looking at, not the one on the main page)
The today's birthdays feature went
The newest member feature went
The chat room went

And also when you clicked on New Posts it showed you all the posts that were replied to since you last logged on and continued to do that until you logged off again, visiting those threads didn't take them off the list like they currently do now. I believe someone was asking about this earlier in the thread... Well we used to have that feature.

So basically a hell of a lot of stuff people are asking for we used to have here at sometime and no matter how many times the admin was asked to reinstate some of them we never found out why they were removed or ever got a straight answer as to whether we'd see any of them again.

I've never been a member of a forum with an arcade, what the heck is it?

Yeah, please, not a clue what this is.

I think it would be fairly simple on this type of forum to allow users to create their own colour schemes from a palette, and even allow them to create their own banners. These could theoretically be approved for public use and made available to other users to select as a site scheme.

pretty much just a collection of really outdated flash games, but it was pretty fun

yeah , there is another forum I go to and they have different skins that you can apply through the User CP somewhere.

I like this blue so I wouldn't change it but there is a way to apply different skins.

Especially with a layout that's so basic. It's not as if there's heaps of formatting to work around. It would be fairly easy for users to customize colours and a banner to match.

Please keep the colours down. Change it if you will, but it's very easy to the eye.
If a forum becomes all flashy and with loads of contrast, I go bezerk.

If the added the option that I'm talking about you can leave it this color while other people can add a different skin if they want type of thing.

You'll never see the color change unless you go over to that person's house and are on their computer looking at the forum.

As far as my knowledge about forums goes, the colour is stored in the profile of that user, so every user will see his or her own colour when he or she logs in :).
SMF does support that, I'm not sure about SEO

What do you mean by SMF and what does SEO mean?

I use another forum that also uses v.bulletin format like this forum and they have skins that each user can choose, four options actually.