Hey MA!! So good to see you! SA here :)
In the beginning there was a lot of fuckery on halfpol and MA, I and one or two others who had assumed specific tasks made tripcodes because there were faggots impersonating us and giving outright false information in order to poison the well, so to speak. It was done ONLY to provide authentication, and when tripcodes were banned (except for Q), we (very) gladly shed ours, happily back to being anon unless making a statement as a part of our chosen task. There were others, however, who were enamored of having a name/trip and being "recognized" (the typical poison of fame-faggotry) and they pitched a duck fit when trips were banned. That should tell you all you need to know.
MA and I worked closely together many times along with rawtextanon and some others to harmonize all our archives and ensure they were all complete and totally accurate. I will personally vouch for MA - he is a stand-up guy who works very hard for all of us, providing an invaluable resource - you should really visit his site just to see it.
I also deeply appreciate GAA and the anons who run the scraper/aggregator sites as they also provide redundant and different ways to present the information to normalfags so they don't have to come here.
SA here I'm not going to trip though, very glad to see you and you're still at it!
Hope you have a great holiday season :)