That's true, though GameFAQs felt ultra-restrictive at the time by the fact that it had mods at all. Even forums on major services at the time like AOL and Yahoo were either practically or totally unmoderated, attracting total shitheads spewing diarrhea long before the days of smartphones and India getting online.
That's pretty much it. Early GameFAQs had bugfuck retarded rules like requiring full censoring for curse words, so even "f***", like was used on the entire rest of the internet, would stick you with a nasty moderation that'd drop your karma. There were no word filters, either, so you had to censor yourself or face the wrath of mods. Which, in retrospect, was fucking retarded. CJayC had the wherewithal to write something to automatically report your post if you included the word "gay" anywhere, but couldn't include something that says "if "fuck", then replace "fuck" with "****" " in the code?
But also, obvious baitposting was unpunished, so a lot of trolls would baitpost and then those who'd respond would get in trouble for breaking the TOS, leading to a hell of a lot of resentment against the staff. The rules were bad and the mods were too. So, a lot of people nuked their accounts as a final "fuck you".