Welcome to The Cutting Room Floor, a wiki about cut, unused, and left over content in video games. Unfortunately, our server is currently offline due to a sustained DDoS attack that was affecting our host's other customers. It's bad — and we're no strangers to scrapers/AI bots and DDoS traffic.
While we're offline, you may want to try the Wayback Machine, a 2023 full wiki archive, or maybe even the original 2002 version of the site. You can also join our Discord community: even if the site is down, you can share your discoveries or ask for help researching!
— X, TCRF operator
We've been on Cloudflare for a few hours now, making sure things are stable. Pretty soon after we moved to CF, someone was kind enough to hammer the server with 80 million requests. Good to know it's still not over...
Assuming we don't have any issues with Cloudflare and our simple test setup overnight, hopefully tomorrow we can get the wiki back online proper and we can all get back to reading about weird crap in video games.
You can tenatively say that our "ETA for restoral" is "Monday night, Pacific time", but note that this is just an estimate, and we'll likely have a lot of work to do.
hi from cloudflare.
We've been running on Fastly since last night, and they've notified me that apparently this simple HTML page and some basic PNGs has cost us... twenty dollars, so far. It hasn't even been 24 hours yet, so to say I'm not very chuffed by this would be an understatement.
Linode sent an update this morning:
10:37 AMI really, really wonder how much this is costing our assailant. I know Linode isn't exactly enterprise-grade, but forcing multiple hosts offline for multiple days can't be cheap...
Hello,
The attack appears to be ongoing. If you would like to try and access your linode using another IP, you can try adding a second one to see if you can use it to connect, as said before.
We'll check back later today to see if the attack is ongoing.
I've also added some notes on our "zip bombs" and a really annoying Twitter character.
Rewrote the status page and added some FAQs to the bottom.
Unfortunately, we're still waiting for the attack to end. There's not much we can do right now on that front. We're working to set up alternative services, but that will take some time to spin up and configure; thank you for your continued patience.
Most recent Linode update:
They have also now confirmed that the DDoS attack traffic targeting your Linode IP has not returned to safe levels since its initial onset, which occurred about an hour prior (August 27 around 10:35pm ET) to you opening this ticket.
Since the volume of the traffic is still high at this time, the DDoS mitigation block remains in place and will be removed automatically once the traffic to the IP returns to acceptable levels.
I set up a backup backup server and somehow even that one gets DDoSed, neat! This person is very persistent.
Fortunately, so am I. So, welcome to round four! Hopefully this time we'll be up for more than a few hours.
We'll keep working to get things back online. See you soon!
Hello from Fastly! Linode has informed us that the DDoS against both our main server and our backup server is still ongoing.
So, now we have a backup backup server. :^)
While we can't directly mitigate the current attack — that's Linode's job (tugging collar) — we're doing what we can to work around it.
They have also now confirmed that the DDoS attack traffic targeting your Linode IP has not returned to safe levels since its initial onset, which occurred about an hour prior (August 27 around 10:35pm ET) to you opening this ticket.
Since the volume of the traffic is still high at this time, the DDoS mitigation block remains in place and will be removed automatically once the traffic to the IP returns to acceptable levels.
Answers from the perspective of the TCRF operator, X.
Nope. We're dealing with a "layer 3 attack", which is targeting the network infrastructure in front of our server. Xe, the main Anubis developer, commented on it here as well.
The normal DDoS traffic we see is the kind Anubis would be helpful for, but this is a different kind of attack that doesn't target the web server. It's not trying to crawl or scrape, it's just sending gibberish to knock things offline.
I cover this in my blog post about being independent. Cloudflare is (in)famous for powering a large amount of the internet, and any time multiple sites are experiencing issues, people ask "Is Cloudflare down?" Part of being independent means not relying on that. They're also heavily pushing "agentic" web nonsense.
If the technical reasons weren't enough, Cloudflare is also no stranger to controversy, and I have no intention of giving them my business if I can at all help it.
we're on cloudflare now. i give up
Right now, we're experimenting with Fastly, a Cloudflare competitor. I can hear you asking, "but didn't you just say—" yes, unfortunately, you know what they say about desperate times. Sometimes you have to adapt, even if you'd rather not. Such is life.
We don't have an ETA for when we'll be back up. This is a solo operation, run entirely by me (hi). This is my "job" right now, so if you'd like to help pay the bills, go click on those Patreon or Ko-fi links at the top of the page.
waiting for the ddos to be over / migrating services to cloudflare.
This question is asked a lot of times, and not always by people with good intentions.
There are a lot of reasons:
tcrf-archive-2026-{week}.tar.gz floating around; see the "keeping it up to date" problem.A sad fact of things these days is that people will use resources intended for a public good for their own ends. One of the most glaring examples of this came last year, when someone joined the ArchiveTeam IRC channel, trying to start a project to "panic archive" our site... As it turned out, they had joined IRC without cloaking their IP address, and when I checked our server's access logs, guess who had been running an exploit scanner at the same time they were talking in that channel.
I've gotten several emails from people claiming to want a copy local of the site for "teaching purposes :^)" (or other similarly boring claims), only to have the email chains suspiciously posted on harassment forums when I say "I'm not interested in that, sorry." Kind of weird.
Sure did! In the modern era of moderated-by-algorithms communities, I don't think people are used to bad attitudes resulting in direct and immediate consequences. Asking is one thing, but when you're told we've already discussed it, when you're told no, when you're told to stop, this is your last warning, continuing to smart off will get you thrown out.
I think the funniest thing that person did, though, was suggesting that the answer to "how will people update it," was a picture of opening an HTML editor... I guess the expectation was that people with local copies would manually edit the HTML of their local copy when a page updated? Ridiculous.
Did I mention there's a downloadable archive?
A traditional zipbomb is a devious piece of data that basically loops on itself to go from "a few hundred bytes" to "impossibly large" really fast ... we weren't actually serving zip bombs, but it was an easy metaphor that, naturally, some people are twisting.
Our "zip bombs" were just normal text content, repeated hundreds of times. The web server would gzip it as part of the transfer process. You'd get gzipped content saying it was 100 MB long; if you unzipped it, that was your own fault. Maybe read the label next time.
If you've ever downloaded a ton of text off the internet, and noticed that somehow that 100 MB dictionary file only took a few MB to get: same deal, just imagine instead of something useful it's gibberish. The page included instructions on what to do, but again, automated systems don't care. That's why they get the "you're being really bad" page and not the "you're blocked" page.
That's not really relevant to the site, but yes, I'm genderqueer and lovin' it. Fun fact: Making our logo rotate through various pride flags for Pride Month last year triggered the first major attack on the site and its operators. Unintimidated, We still did it again this year. (Ironically, it was the anti-AI rule that spurred this year's attacks.)
The most important thing you can be is yourself, and the most important thing you can do is stand for what you believe in.
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." — Unknown
You might think that, for a wiki about cut content in video games, it doesn't matter. But all you have to do is look at how mad it makes people, to know that yes. It very much does matter. And boy are they mad about it. (update: hoo lord are they mad about it.)
I have been asked if I am directly accusing this guy of being the one staging the attack. Frankly?
Nope! His Twitter post brought it on, but I do not believe he is personally, directly responsible for the act itself. Much like how someone pointing and going "someone should do something about that" isn't attacking something, it's just, you know, suggesting. The fact the building falls over later is irrelevant.
What Ron Stoner did do, is:
rm -rf . ~" instruction
That's just regarding our website! You can look at his own website if you'd like to see him vandalize Wikipedia to poison LLMs (his pinned post, of course) or maybe spin up a botnet to give himself a million followers on nostr.
So, no, I don't think he did it. But I also can't prove that a self-professed cybersecurity expert, who can clearly afford the perks of company logo bluecheckdom, who clearly has a grudge against us, didn't. I have no way of knowing.
But I will say, that trying to message random people on our Discord server, rather than reaching out directly, is more than a little. I dunno. Weird?
STONER: They think I'm ddosing them and I'm not. More talking to lawyers about the false accusations and the news article.Like, again, this was to a random person in our Discord server, not staff or a mod or anything. Okay. Maybe just email me at
(TCRF server member): Are you speaking to "real" lawyers?
STONER: I work in the industry and have for years. Think critically about that. I'm not some rando 16 year old.
STONER: I am willing to drop any future claims if they want to reach out and talk about a possible retraction/apology.
xkeeper at gmail dot com or something next time? (But no, I'm not apologizing for showing you Claude's logo or calling you an asshole, asshole.)
Every time I think this can't get any stupider I end up finding myself writing a new update here and I'm kind of tired of it. Wrong kind of stoner, man.
See also: Kotaku article
This DDoS seems to have been triggered by someone using Claude Code and getting banned from the site for it(orig), intentionally evading that ban to make up a fake story about their LLM wiping their entire OS, and then firing off multiple abuse reports to our host(orig).
It may not surprise you that this guy has some interesting thoughts on consent(orig), or that he has multiple blog posts in which he brags about poisoning LLMs to win championships or flooding a social network with spam to give himself 1,000,000 followers.
Why are AI people always like this.
The funniest thing of all of this has to be someone seriously asking Gork for legal advice. I still laugh every time I see it.
