August 27 TCRF DDoS Attack Postmortem

Commenters reacted to a postmortem about The Cutting Room Floor’s DDoS response and its turn to Cloudflare. Some, like timpera and ndiddy, lamented that niche sites have to rely on services like Cloudflare and criticized the user friction of anti-DDoS pages. VCFundedGenYer blamed AI for ruining hobby sites, while others objected to the site’s more aggressive anti-bot moves: infotainment called the owner “terminally online” for adding targeted ban pages, and madiling noted users could be banned based on referring sites. Xkeeper, the operator, explained the rationale: Tor produced a lot of abusive traffic, and a specific “claude-code” user agent repeatedly evaded blocks, so she implemented persistent bans and only escalated to Cloudflare as a last resort after prolonged harassment.

Opinion divides over whether those measures are reasonable self-defense or petty antagonism. Jeroenhd praised the tactic as effective and well-aimed, InvisibleUp linked some of the abuse to harassment communities like Kiwi Farms, and moorow asked if the bans targeted only Claude-code. Infotainment argued both sides overreacted. Xkeeper responded that the Claude-code block is deliberate because of its networking behavior and prevalence in logs, while other tools either hit standard anti-AI pages or are left to captcha challenges, framing the choices as pragmatic responses to sustained abuse.