Komo, think like this: avi was trying to help you understand what KRD said, not him to make clear what he meant. 
Well Prankster that doesn't really make sense, seeing as I don't have superpowers which make me able to read other peoples minds...
You only have to read their posts
It's all in there, just as Prankster said.
Rating is something that is quite often discussed in chess, so it's not really a new discussion for me to read about. Ratings on TUS should be considered as split: the seasonal rating displays how strong a clan/player has performed during a season, while the overall displays how strong a clan/player is.
The thing is: a rating number tells you absolutely nothing if there's no context. A while back, Magnus Carlsen got the highest chess rating ever: 1862. This broke Garry Kasparov's 10 year record of 1851.
However, let's take a look at the #2 at the time. In Carlsen's case, the #2 had 1812. In Kasparov's case, the #2 had 2770.
This means that Kasparov was more ahead of the rest of the field than Carlsen was (by quite a wide margin), even though his top rating was lower. If you take everybody's rating in the world and add 400 points (or remove 400 points), it doesn't change the difference in points, which is what ratings are all about. (To make sense of these small point difference, in chess, you can not win more than a couple of points by winning a game, unless you beat someone who is much, much stronger than you)
The same applies to the overall ratings here: We only know CF's highest rating here, but to make sense of it, you have to know the ratings of their opponents. Everybody's rating depends on the average rating of the rest of the competition.
Now, when people with high ratings suddenly stop playing, they are taking their high ratings with them - the points are lost to the ladder. This means the average rating drops as well. Suddenly, reaching that higher rating becomes impossible, because nobody is in the same rating range (as avirex explained). Saving rating records is fine, but you also have to take into consideration the context under which it was reached.
An illustrating example in chess of an inactive player keeping a high rating probably would be Bobby Fischer, who stopped playing chess after he became world champion in 1972 (madness set in, sad story). It wasn't until 1990 until somebody got past that number. Does that mean nobody was stronger than Fischer until that moment? If you ask some really strong chess players who knew both Fischer and Karpov (the next world champion) well, most of them thought Karpov was stronger, even in the 70s already. In short, the inactive rating doesn't adequately display strength anymore. There are a lot of examples of inactive people coming back, still having their old ratings, but getting squashed by their opposition. A rating decay would have accurately displayed the slowly losing of skills.
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