I'm not being entirely critical of gaf moderation. It's not all that bad, and they do have goof ups. It's a huge site and there's a lot to moderate so they can't naturally do everything and there will be a lot of inconsistencies and preference for specific users, but that's not really any different from any other forum moderation. It's just exponentially larger and more noticeable for gaf because the site is fucking big. I'm not justifying them closing the wrasslegaf threads, and I'm as critical of their treatment of community-based threads as any, but if they're getting multiple complaints, and only really have one moderator (I'm assuming Y2Kev?) reading and moderating a thread so large it increases a new page at least every 30 minutes to an hour (on the 100 posts per page setting btw)? I can't blame them for closing it temporarily then.
The crux of the matter is that GAF is far too big for its own good now. The opposite take is that GAF needs more staff members.
GAF moderation fails for many reasons, but one reason I think that's the case is the lack of dedicated moderators. Typically on forums, there's a forum section and you assign a specific amount of mods to that forum. GAF doesn't have that structure. It worked during a time before NeoGAF and it was still humble Gaming Age Forums back in the day, but now you've got a huge forum where any thread can be knocked to page 2 within seconds due to the sheer volume of posting activity.
What I'm saying is that you can pin this issue on the gaf administration for not adapting GAF moderation and organization to the size of its forum. Despite the forums success, they have done very little to actually update the site with age. It's very much structured the same way it was ten years, community forums aside. At SA, there's an entire fucking dedicated wrestling forum with dedicated wrestling moderators. There's a dedicated sports forum with dedicated sports moderators. On GAF, you've got a huge ass thread for usually only one mod who gives a shit, having to wade through 5-10 pages at once. Shit is ineffectual and outdated.
