Hi, TCRF operator here! (*she)

This story has been escalating for over a year at this point. Originally, identified bots were given a generic "access denied" message. Then a special generic "LLM poison"-type page (some joke misinformation). Once I noticed that Claude-Code bots, specifically, were evading those blocks -- making one request, then changing their user-agent and trying again -- I started adding the persistent ban for bot misbehavior.

That you didn't know any of this until now suggests, I think, that there isn't really much of a problem. After all, this only affects agents reporting as Claude-Code.

The primary goal my side of this has been to interrupt and annoy LLM/AI users, and to that it has been working incredibly well.

My previous blog post, written before this DDoS attack, went into some of the challenges of being an independent website that avoided using third-party services (outside of Linode, our host). Cloudflare was always my "last resort" — I actually signed up for an account there a bit over a year ago, during an earlier attack — and it finally became time to use that last resort.

As for "terminally online", I guess you could say guilty as charged. I've been running communities for over 20 years and TCRF specifically for nearly 17, longer than a lot of our users have been alive. It certainly gets results.