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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   2115 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 22, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Did theMotte get DDoSed in the past couple of days? I wasn't able to access it for quite a while.

Relatedly, is there a designated off-site “rallying point” in case this place ever goes down indefinitely? Maybe my time on imageboards has made me too paranoid of a permanent site closure, but I feel like it would still be useful to know to, say, check the ACX open threads if this site is ever gone for more than a week.

Two chats (Telegram and Discord) are "recommended" in the sidebar of the front page (which is not visible if your browser window is too narrow, including mobile browsers).

which is not visible if your browser window is too narrow, including mobile browsers

So that explains why I can’t see them. Maybe it’s good to keep us phoneposting hordes out, though. Thanks!

Not to be rude, but how can it be so hard to run a functional website that never has any new features and has a userbase size in the hundreds?

To be fair, it was surprisingly annoying to get Discourse to be consistently performant just shy of a decade ago, and that was before you risked being bombarded by random and poorly-written AI scrapers. My impression, admittedly as a not-web-dev, is that the rdrama codebase is somehow one of the better options, but it's still easy to get surprise problems even in good codebases.

To be fair, it is a random piece of custom software, rather than something with actual tenure and documentation.

It appears that @ZorbaTHut has been using an LLM for recent changes to this website's code. Perhaps that is the culprit. ;-)

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.

Yeah, something's up. It might not even be over yet, there was also a brief moment of respite yesterday, and then the site went down again.

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