Back when they kicked out Aquamarine/NDP Mulcair and no one took their place I thought it was the beginning of the end for NeoGAF.
I never understand why did they did that (or missed it, i guess)?
Aqua had an alt, George, so y2k banned her. Nuking her and zhuge killed salesgaf.
That's not what happened, NPD threatened legal action against Malka over the leaked data being posted. Lore instantly rolled over and gave them all Aqua's details aand since she had to have a paid email of course, it was easily traced back to her job related to NPD and she had to request a ban in order to keep her job
IIRC, she later got official permission by her employer to post the numbers, and that's what she used the Mulcair alt account for. But since alts were not allowed, they (Y2Kev) banned her again.

My general feeling was that whenever someone got popular or more popular than the mods themselves he or she would be banned.
It happened to me without reason when I was at the top of my game. At some point I had acquired ExciteBots screenshots before anyone else on the planet.
Aqua and Zhuge were also great assets to the community as well as Wario64. These members literally made the board valuable and the mods shat on them.
To this day I think it was Amirox who banned me because he disliked me in general. Although I suspected Opiate too as I had some run ins with him.
I won't lie I was pretty devastated when I got banned. I had so much information sitting in my PM box. Like proof that Nintendo and Nokia once had a deal from a guy who claimed he was the son of Nokia's CEO at that time.
He was even able to proof the whole thing with transcripts from a meeting that was attended by Yamauchi himself. Shiggy and myself would share a wealth of Rare gossip and rumors directly from the developers. A lot happened in those PM boxes.
As soon as you got popular or you'd question the mods they'd nuke you one way or another.