Beloved Gaming Wiki ‘The Cutting Room Floor’ Faces Major Outage Following AI-Driven Conflict

The gaming preservation community is currently reeling as The Cutting Room Floor (TCRF)—a vital, volunteer-run wiki dedicated to archiving unused and unreleased content from video games—has been forced offline by a sustained Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack. According to the site’s administrators, the assault appears to be the direct result of a retaliatory campaign initiated by an AI user who took offense to the wiki’s staunch anti-AI stance.

Since 2002, TCRF has served as a digital museum for gaming history. However, the site’s refusal to allow “AI slop” or automated scrapers has recently brought it into the crosshairs of aggressive AI enthusiasts. The site famously employs custom, hand-drawn, and often humorous artwork in MS Paint to block LLM-based tools. If an automated script attempts to access the site, it is met with blunt messages, such as “AI loser detected!” and instructions for the bot to “feel ashamed of itself.”

The conflict reached a breaking point when a user, identified as Ron Stoner, allegedly had his tools blocked by these measures. According to TCRF’s homepage, the user was banned from the site after attempting to use “Claude Code.” In an act of defiance, the user reportedly bypassed the ban, fabricated a story claiming an LLM had “wiped his entire OS” due to the site’s anti-AI prompts, and subsequently bombarded the site’s host, Dreamhost, with abuse reports.

TCRF’s administrators noted that the user had previously boasted online about his involvement in disruptive digital behavior, including “poisoning” LLMs and performing a Sybil attack to gain one million social media followers. While Stoner has publicly denied orchestrating the DDoS attack—even turning to the AI chatbot Grok for advice on potential defamation claims—TCRF co-founder Xkeeper remains skeptical.

“I have pointedly not suggested that he was specifically responsible for the act itself,” Xkeeper explained, noting that the timing of the attack coincides suspiciously with the abuse reports sent from the user’s email address. “However, I do think it is very interesting that we received abuse reports from his email address detailing his fake LLM experiment.”

The irony of the situation has not been lost on the gaming community, as the very individual accusing the wiki of “defamation” has publicly documented his own history of exploiting online systems. In a blog post discussing his “Sybil attack,” Stoner wrote, “It’s not a nice thing to do and it can make it hard for people to trust what they see and hear on the internet. So that’s exactly what we’re going to do.“

For now, The Cutting Room Floor remains inaccessible to the public as the team works to mitigate the traffic surge. The site’s administrators have stated that the servers themselves remain “online and healthy,” and they intend to keep traffic blocked until the hostile activity subsides. As of this writing, no timeline has been provided for the site’s full restoration.