The Crawler

The Crawler in June 2025

Discussion about the Crawler on February 11th, 2026.

The Crawler is a web crawler run by 8811 northwest of Spawn. It is currently the longest running experiment in Our World of Text, lasting for two to three years. It has existed since 2022 at the latest.

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  An early version of The Crawler running directly below the Center Console(February 7th, 2022)
• 
  The Crawler in September 2024
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  Left: The Crawler in January 2023 Right: The Crawler in December 2024
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  Crawler running after FP temporarily disabled color on the Mainpage(December 19th, 2025)

Chat on February 19th, 2026:

[6621]: clop why do you run the crawler

[6621]: is it all a big troll

[*8911] crawler plus: i was bored

[*8911] crawler plus: maybe

[6621]: so you've been bored for what, three years

[*8911] crawler plus: yea

[6621]: so it seems like the crawler is running through pages from a bunch of websites and its list is getting shorter

[6621]: so will it run down eventually

[*8911] crawler plus: third number on first line is true list length

[6621]: 24,842,386?

[*8911] crawler plus: correct

[6621]: so is that a number of web pages

[6621]: and is it the number that the crawler has already crawled, or that is still has to crawl?

[*8911] crawler plus: number of domains with at least 1 pending link

[*8911] crawler plus: technically hosts not domains but whatever

[6621]: so why does the number of lines below (like dx.doi.org, archive.org, etc) keep getting shorter

[*8911] crawler plus: i keep removing them

[6621]: so is it not actually running down

[*8911] crawler plus: we'll figure something out we still have 497 years left

PCUser013: we?

[*8911] crawler plus: yes

[6621]: so you intend to keep this thing going as long as there's an owot to put it on?

[*8911] crawler plus: if owot dies in the next 497 years then yes

[*8911] crawler plus: i blame the voices