I honestly don't know how to distinguish the two.
Almost certainly, though. I've never seen a community that wasn't, at least numerically, "dominated" by lurkers.
ZorbaTHut
8d ago
Honestly if anything it's better at fixing these problems than I was :V Webdev has never been my speciality.
As near as I can tell, the basic issue we're running into is that load is increasing, heavily thanks to bot scraping, and that's resulting in various things that weren't problems becoming problems. The earlier one turned out to be a massive leak in our Currently Online Users reporting; this wasn't a big deal when we had maybe a few thousand users, but as soon as we started having tons of "users" (including IPs as users!) it blew up and become a gargantuan perf issue.
I'm honestly curious if rDrama ever ran into that same problem.
Anyway, the latest one was kind of sitting around passively; we did a redesign to improve performance, but it turns out we missed a bunch of stuff, and thankfully Claude knows these tools better than I do and can put in automated warnings for various performance thing. So that should cut a few hundred SQL queries on big pages.
Coupled to that was a nasty bug that would kill threads faster than they should be killed, which itself would cause server crashes, and that was a lot of boom.
The biggest problem is that I never had a good way to instrument this and figure out what was going on perf-wise, and now I have . . . some tools for this . . . so hopefully it's just a matter of squashing issues as they show up.
ZorbaTHut
9d ago
I'm kind of surprised nobody here has Claude Opus access, and modern Opus is a lot better than Sonnet 4.0, so I went ahead and hucked it at Claude Opus 4.6. For the record, my setup was:
- I prepended "here's an AI test, go solve it" to this post, then copypasted the whole thing in
- I chose Extended Thinking and Research, which is the mode where it will cheerfully scan literally a thousand webpages if it thinks it's a good idea
Unfortunately, for some reason, Claude Opus doesn't let you share advanced-research discussions, so I can't link the full "discussion". But it didn't ask for any extra info, just hopped into it.
(One note: it tends to be limited per query, so asking for two albums at once is going to do about half as much work for each. I dunno if that would produce different results though.)
It took about twenty minutes, scanned 711 sources, and produced this full report, which goes into detail on methodology and sources. The tl;dr:
Both The Turtles' "Grim Reaper of Love" and the Henry Paul Band's Feel the Heat lack unambiguous release dates in readily available sources. Applying the hierarchical methodology systematically, the best-supported release date for "Grim Reaper of Love" is Monday, May 16, 1966, and for Feel the Heat is approximately Monday, July 21, 1980 — though both dates require significant inferential work across multiple source levels.
So, it ended up with the same GRoL result as GPT 5.2 Agent.
It did find the Wikipedia page and decided it was wrong, and it wasn't able to read the ARSA database. I don't think it's possible for the web version to apply a username/password, but I could probably have gotten that working with a local login; in the end, it fell back to the Billboard. Didn't manage to find the radio chart, but that's the ARSA access issue.
For FtH, it queried the copyright office, but got access-denied errors. I'm guessing this is specifically anti-AI-bot stuff :V
This does feel like a lot of the sources you want to rely on are specifically blocking Claude. I'm slightly tempted to set up local tools that pretend to be not-Claude, or give it access to a web browser and tell it to go wild; that might be more effective.
Hopefully fixed, at least for the moderate future; this ended up being a bunch of performance fixes and tweaks. Things are looking at lot better sitewise now.
At least until a bot finds a new URL that's really slow :V
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