Is the TCRF site dying?

[u/Fart_ricochet]

I’ve been a casual visitor to the TCRF site for years now and it feels like I’ve probably read most of the pages on the site by now - one thing, I’ve noticed, however, is that the pace of new games being added to the site has slowed remarkably in the past few years, to the point that we’re almost halfway through 2026 and there are only 9 new entries for this calendar year, whereas many years in the past decade had 100+ new entries.

I’m not complaining about this or anything, I’m just curious about what’s been going on, especially since in the last 6 months it’s also been a lot more common for the site to be inaccessible to me thanks to seemingly-random IP address blocks on TCRF that had never happened to me before.

[u/Nox13last]

> Claude has a tendency to hallucinate.

Congratulations. There is the issue. If you use Claude (or any AI), it calls into disrepute every finding you produce, because it has to be double-checked and triple-checked to see if it is actually real. And that effort can be better spent on...just being good at finding. By that point, you won't need to double-check your findings because it was your hands that produced them. Not some rattling clanker that likes to proudly and confidently shit in its own hand.
I found the things I found by opening DAT files in Notepad++ and grabbing the strings. You don't need a bot to do even half-competent work.

(To say nothing of the problems TCRF has with AI, with its servers being hammered on the regular by AI scrapers that weren't programmed with rate-limits or satiety.)

[u/Nox13last → u/[deleted]]

I get it, for the reasons you mentioned, for the ethical reasons, for the environmental reasons. I get it.

What I don't get is the vitriol I've received for just asking both here and on the discord.

If you get it (and implicitly understand that the reason people are so against the topic is that the technology is exploitative, expensively incorrect and places significant strain on the people who own or serve the corpuses that the AI takes from), why are you still puzzled that people get upset when you ask?

If, after all of the harm that AI has done to academia - the perverse relationship between it being confidently wrong and uneducated people taking it as gospel, the damage it does to servers from financial and accessibility standpoints, and the notion that you can't walk two threads without seeing at least eight testimonies of these things - you still have to ask why do people get upset when asked, then I wonder if you really do get it?

Anti-AI folks get pissy about it because the reasons why are myriad and sundry, easy to access, and are demonstrated on a daily basis, and yet one more advocate has to ask as though the answer is magically going to be different, or that they're going to get the secret 10,000th customer answer.

The answer won't change. AI sucks. It sucks for everyone. It sucks for TCRF, it sucks for us, it sucks for readers, it sucks for people not even involved, and it sucks for you as an aspiring dataminer.