No that basically all happend around the same time. If you look at the SAclopedia entries for ADTRW, they're all from early 2004 and you see things like "The fact that Lowtax hates makes it the forum whipping-boy."

Those were written by random goons which aren't any better of a source. It didn't seriously affect ADTRW until the Helldump era - one of Lowtax's worst ideas where he just turned the forums into a circular firing squad, then after people made him delete it, whined about it for the rest of his life.