NeoGAF goes silent following allegations against owner
via Polygon
NeoGAF, the pre-eminent forum for video gaming discussion for more than a decade, has been offline for much of the past 24 hours.
The trouble began in the late afternoon Saturday when allegations of sexual assault were leveled against the site’s owner, Tyler Malka, who goes by the handle “Evilore.” In the following post, user James Scott references this Facebook post, uploaded to Imgur four days ago.
A post to the forum earlier on Saturday also called out “really horrible behavior towards women while publicly decrying the same thing.”
Late into Saturday evening, nearly all of NeoGAF’s new posts all reflected the ongoing controversy. Some condemned Malka, some asked what had happened, others made light of the situation, still others flooded the forum with memes or nonsense posts. NeoGAF has been offline since about midnight ET Sunday.
NeoGAF began in 2006 as a relaunch of the old Gaming-Age Forums. Since then, it has been well known as a primary source for the discussion of video games. Developers and industry figures have visited it to discuss or explain upcoming or recently launched projects or hardware. Some members under anonymous handles have gone on to become industry insiders, breaking news on the the forum itself or shedding more light on topics affecting games development.
After the post yesterday afternoon numerous commentators offered “suicide posts,” which were deliberately written in hopes of being banned. NeoGAF is a public forum but it has strict moderation and registration requirements, which has invited criticism of heavy-handedness or censorship in the past. Many of these moderators are said to have quit.
According to USGamer, NeoGAF is preparing a statement about the controversy but so far has issued none, and the site still is down. Polygon has tried reaching out to Malka through social media, but his use of it appears to have been very limited since 2016.
