It sounds like when the forum's permissions was set up for users, the box that allows thread starters too edit all posts got checked. I used to have a SMF forum a long time ago. They had so many cool features. I thought that box did exist.    Oops. 

I just found a site that has some good solid data on page rankings.
pagerank-checker-tool

If you scroll half way down the page, you will see the post "the fundamental understanding of Google..."

I'll stop posting to this topic now.