NeoGAF back online, owner denies allegations

Over the weekend, popular gaming forum, NeoGAF, ran into some trouble as allegations of sexual misconduct were made against the site’s owner, Tyler ‘Evilore’ Malka. This caused a good chunk of the site’s moderation staff to step down and in turn, the site was closed down for a few days. Today, NeoGAF came back online, with the site’s owner denying the allegations made against him.

In a post titled ‘the state of NeoGAF’, Evilore said that the allegation is “not true”, adding that “the individual making the accusation isn’t credible”. According to him, the allegation posted on Facebook “doesn’t reconcile logically with the facts”, adding that there is evidence and witnesses to corroborate that, though neither of these were presented in the forum post.

It turns out that the accusing Facebook post was posted on Wednesday last week, at which point, Evilore brought it up with the moderation team so that they could be prepared should it surface on the forums. On Thursday, the post was deleted from Facebook, but a statement was already being prepared at this point. Eventually, the information did make its way to NeoGAF and mods began stepping down after they “hit their emotional limit”.

The post then turns to addressing the future of NeoGAF:

“Since that whole mess, lasting from Friday morning through Saturday, before we formally went offline for maintenance and repair and restructure, we've just been trying to figure out the best course of action for NeoGAF going forward. And as stories began being published by various outlets, I issued some comments to the press, since everything coming out was proving to be sensationalized, opportunist, and unprofessional.”

“We've all become increasingly stressed and weary this year in ways even I'm not accustomed to by now, and discussions on heated news, political issues, and social issues on the off-topic side of the site have become areas no one has wanted to moderate in the open for fear of backlash or just general exposure to the inevitable toxicity. I've gone in there myself to take the heat, since it's very much my responsibility to do so before anyone else's, but there's been little headway, mostly just more anger and resentment and a lot of bans. I don't think this necessarily reflects on our community; more so the tone of the entire internet this year with regards to heated issues.”

With that in mind, it looks like the off-topic forum on NeoGAF will be gone for the foreseeable future. Evilore ends his post saying that while users “have no obligations” to respect him or believe anything he says about his personal life, they should “respect the mod team by following the rules”.

KitGuru Says: An accusation like the one made last week can be hard to shake off. We have yet to see how this will affect NeoGAF in the long run but it looks like for the time being, the forum will be remaining online with the intention of sticking around.

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