I remember the "good ole days" when I was banned from NeoGAF (then Gaming-Age forums) for supporting George W. Bush. Today, these people regularly face accusations bad enough to put their prior critics out of business.
It was 2002, yes, twelve years ago. I found Gaming-Age through a smaller videogame website as well as an IRC network called Damaged Networks. Like NeoGAF, Damaged.net mistreated all of its users. But this time, Damaged was onto something, because multiple "Nintendorks" chatters were posting content that was probably illegal. Damaged IRC responded by perm-banning the Nintendorks chatroom, #Studio64, so Nintendorks created its own server - and invited #GA, which is NeoGAF's longtime chatroom. This was about a decade ago.
I discussed my conservative viewpoints and Christianity in #GA, only to find that the moderator, "Dragona," was a muslim. She was an angry feminist muslim who hated Christianity. I was banned from #GA. After the website admins realized I had an account on Gaming-Age, I was banned on the forum also, though I did nothing wrong either on the forum or in the chatroom. Yes, I have been banned now 105,000+ hours from NeoGAF on account that I supported President Bush.
I have subsequently been advised that Dragona is a "sex changer," male to female, allegedly posing as a female. A couple years back, 50+ (probably much higher) posters were banned in one single NeoGAF thread after saying that they disagreed with sex changes.
I responded ~2005ish by starting a blog called "GAFcritic." The premise of GAFcritic was that I was a conservative voice standing up for George W. Bush to a liberal GAF dictatorship. At the time, I was ridiculed. People said that GAF was just a website, so why bother starting a blog? A lot of people defended the NeoGAF admins and found themselves banned from NeoGAF anyway.
Today, I don't even need to argue about NeoGAF's liberal bias. People started twitter accounts to do that. People openly acknowledge this on NeoGAF threads, leading to awkward posts where liberals say things like "well, the argument against affirmative action is..." since there are no conservatives around to actually raise a dissenting point of view.
My observation - unique among the complaints against NeoGAF - is that the length of NeoGAF's average post has dropped to 1 or 2 sentences now. NeoGAF's posts are so short that you could actually get probated for making a similar post at SA. People are afraid, and they're afraid because they understand that the NeoGAF admins are bullies who just don't care. If you say something that makes you stand out to anybody, you could be toast. They can't take dissenting views, but the truth is worse. They enjoy mistreating their posters. Those 5 or 6 month wait times to sign up an account? Sure, it helps to have a line. But I think they just want to keep out the people whom they've banned previously.
Their EncyclopediaDramatica page is probably overblown but it's not terribly far from reality.
If we had a world war and troops were sent overseas, I wonder between NeoGAF and SomethingAwful, which of the two sites would have more liberals betray our country. And by the way, how many non-Americans (and worse, non-American moderators with itchy ban fingers) have been opining on every single American political thread at both of these websites?
