Neocities Founder Stuck in Chatbot Hell After Bing Blocked 1.5 Million Sites

Neocities founder Kyle Drake has spent weeks trapped in Microsoft's automated support loop after discovering that Bing quietly blocked all 1.5 million websites hosted on his platform, a free web-hosting service that has kept the spirit of 1990s GeoCities alive since 2013.

Drake first noticed the issue last summer and thought it was resolved, but a second complete block went into effect in January, cratering Bing traffic from roughly half a million daily visitors to zero. He submitted nearly a dozen tickets through Bing's webmaster tools but could not get past the AI chatbot to reach a human. After Ars Technica contacted Microsoft, the company restored the Neocities front page within 24 hours but most subdomains remain blocked. Microsoft cited policy violations related to low-quality content yet declined to identify the offending sites or work directly with Drake to fix the problem.

Welcome to the future

[Mr. Dollar Ton]

Where you're so insignificant that nobody will review the random "AI" decision that will leave you hanging dry out there. But if you pay your VIP subscription, you'll be way, way ahead.

Re:

[shanen]

I don't blame people for brevity in FPs if getting FP was the objective, but it would be nice if the FP poster would use the anchor to clarify any ambiguities caused by the rush to FP. Or perhaps FP "pressure" wasn't involved and you just write like that? (In solution terms, would it help if there was a limit on FP?)

In this case the "Insightful" moderation got me to wrestle with it. I think "you" is Neocities, but it's still hard to figure out where the insight is supposed to be. Something about the financi

Re:

[Mr. Dollar Ton]

You'll figure it out when you, trying to negotiate treatment for that pneumonia, are placed in an endless chat loop with the AI. The knowledge will be cemented when in the course of the loop the AI switches you to an agentic persona that will recommend some funeral options.

Re:

[shanen]

Pretty sure that was going for funny, but don't see much relevance to what I wrote.

As bad as cloudflare?

[dwater]

This sounds almost like normal life for me, but cloudflare are the offenders, not bing/Microsoft. Censorship on the Internet, USA style.

What?

[SlashbotAgent]

At first I thought this was just a stupid troll, but it's modded +5 insightful. But, I guess that I am out of the loop.

What are you referring to here? What does Microsoft delisting sites in their search index got to do with Cloudflare?

Re:

[caseih]

It's all about gate keeping. More and more of the internet is behind cloudfare, so if cloudfare blocks you from accessing a site, there's very little you or the site you're trying to access can do. There's no one at cloudfare that a mere browser user can talk to to find out why they were blocked. So between the big search engines and cloudfare, they essentially control the modern internet. Cloudfare solves one of the problems of internet vandalism by absorbing and blocking DDOS attacks, but it comes a pr

Re:

[bartoku]

I am still confused how the grandparent gets moderated up as insightful, and would assert it should instead be moderated down as off topic.
But I suspect that Slashdot users with their VPNs, not Safari/Edge/Chrome browsers, and Linux OS are tripping over Cloudflare blocking more often and venting their frustration with a misplaced up vote...or a bit of USA hate in there as well since he called that out.

But please correct me if I am wrong on the following understanding of Cloudflare vs Bing:

Cloudflare is paid

Re:

[caseih]

Sure. A less popular browser like Firefox.I get blocked for no reason by cloudfare at least once a week.

What - people still use Bing ?

[slincolne]

I thought that Bing was dead - just a placeholder to change after you installed Windows (who knew ?)

Re:

[NotEmmanuelGoldstein]

As a US site, it suffers the same censorship of images, web-sites and 'wokeness' as Google.

DuckDuckGo uses Bing. It's good for long established web-pages, has less product-placement than Google and less AI than Google (although that's a mixed result). Like Google, certain keywords and searching for recent events will be flooded by pop-culture drivel.

Re:What - people still use Bing ?

[Vlad_the_Inhaler]

I use DuckDuckGo and DDG is underpinned by Bing.
Most of the time the results are adequate although more obscure links are often broken - the sites have lapsed weeks earlier. This is not always a bad thing, the broken links serve as input to the Wayback Machine.

Microsoft sucks

[SysEngineer]

AI chat hell is going to be more common in the future. MS has always had bad after sale support for users. Remember the joke about the "In a plane" answer?

Re: Microsoft sucks

[OrangeTide]

Wait until your health insurance uses chatbots for prescription refills

Re: Microsoft sucks

[jbengt]

My car insurance already uses AI chatbots. Couldn't get it to understand needing roadside assistance (part of our policy). Also couldn't handle that we were from out of state. And at one point got into their "press # if . . . " routine that didn't have an option for our non-crash-related situation. Ended up having to hang up and call our rep in our home state and have her handle it, which she had a hard time with also, but at least she could bypass the chatbot. In the end we got assistance from a friendly stranger, instead.

Re:

[groobly]

It already does. And fails 100% of the time. Fortunately, humans are still available if you work hard.

Re:

[gweihir]

Microsoft has always sucked badly, but they were a lot less important in the past. You probably have to sue them these days to get them to pay attention at all.

In the EU, you may also try a GDPR request like "Why are my pages blocked?" and they will have to answer that by law if it is personal pages. Some European YouTube creators have had good success with that when they could not find out why they got demonetized at all via regular channels. Under the GDPR, all data stored about you by an enterprise and a

Nobody uses it

[HnT]

Dont worry, nobody uses bing anyway!

Re:

[sabbede]

Well, I do. Google seems to look and work worse every time I use it. It's just a mess of sponsored links now. I can't figure out what I'm looking at anymore.

low-quality content

[weirdow]

If that was truly the reason M$ should block their own msn homepage.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

MS also provide *.github.io which has been used for bad stuff: https://www.proofpoint.com/us/... [proofpoint.com]

Re:

[Calydor]

A lot of the early internet was low-quality content, but it was how people chose to express themselves online and how they learned how to BE online.

Re:

[Turkinolith]

"Low quality" is such an arbitrary term it's practically useless to describe anything. Pretty much sums up to "we don't like it"

This doesn't sound bad...

[mattr]

I am an AI developer but... yeah this doesn't sound bad /s
1. Invest in AI
2. Train AI on all the content
3. Block the content / Chatbot hell
4. Profit

Repeat offenses have graduated penalty

[tepples]

Microsoft is indeed private sector. However, Microsoft is public in several other ways, which invite regulation in Slashdot's home country:

1. Microsoft is a publicly traded corporation. This is regulated by SEC.
2. Microsoft sells hardware products to the public. This is regulated by CPSC.
3. Microsoft operates websites used by the public. This is regulated by an army of private-sector civil lawyers that enforce ADA.
4. Most importantly in this case, Microsoft has a monopoly on desktop computer operating syste

Re: Repeat offenses have graduated penalty

[ToasterMonkey]

I thought the government couldn't compel speech, the 1st amendment and all that. Removing the right to curate search results for quality purposes is so backwards and unintelligent, who came up with that? GeoCities is unarguably worth removing from search indexes. Send it right to the bottom of the bottom to be charitable.

Re:

[tepples]

I thought the government couldn't compel speech, the 1st amendment and all that.

The government compels a Surgeon General's warning on packages of cigarettes and nutrition facts on packaged food.

GeoCities is unarguably worth removing from search indexes.

This claim deserves greater scrutiny in light of the possibility that Microsoft could use its Windows monopoly to promote hosting a website on Azure over hosting it on Neocities.

Surprisingly on point

[Whooty McWhooface]

> Microsoft cited policy violations related to low-quality content.... Yep, that's keeping the spirit of Geocities alive, alright!

Re:Surprisingly on point

[HiThere]

But they wouldn't identify any specific problems. I.e., they're lying.

Re:

[sabbede]

Nah, they detected blinking Comic Sans text next to a webring icon and marked it accordingly.

Re:

[noshellswill]

Do I smell an elitist stench in your comment? All wrapped up-in CSS & JavaScript crap? Naturally being a Linux-only lusr I DO look down on Micro$ofties of all ilk ... so I know elitist memes when I see them.

I've considered re-opening my old  "ButchersBoulevard" website on Neocities ... choke on it.

Re:

[sabbede]

My thoughts exactly!

Policy violations?

[msauve]

>Microsoft cited policy violations related to low-quality content

I hope they're being consistent and also blocking Microsoft websites.

garbo

[invisiblefireball]

it's just fascist bullshit, i don't know why y'all don't get this. capitalism is fascist in nature and all its roads lead in that direction. This is their wet dream, more than a century in the making - this has always been the goal

Bananas

[maird]

That reminds of a radio story broadcast by a real news station about being stuck on hold for a long time with an automated receptionist. The automated phone call routing system "expert" being interviewed suggested that the best way to get through to a human is to say nothing more than a single word that makes no sense with respect to the business you are calling or any reason you might call. So, as long as it's not a banana related business say only the word "bananas" to the automated receptionist every time you are asked anything, no matter what you are asked. The interviewee reported that most systems will give up quickly and route you to a human. I assume plural nouns or even one word of a name unrelated to the called business form the best set to choose a word from because many verbs and adjectives could be used by the system to infer the experience making you call leading to an automated answer from the customer help database. The advice was to use the same ridiculous single word every time asked anything by the automated receptionist on a given call, i.e. even when the receptionist says "sorry, could you provide more detail" only say "bananas" again in response. I'm sure the automated support loop from the article was more online rather than a phone call. But even telling the online front-end to it nothing about your problem and nothing that could be used to infer a reason for your use would leave it helpless unless you were routed to a human. Please enter details of the problem you are experiencing? "bananas" That might get you help about how to use the default bananas picture when adding a desktop icon for something but there are will be more confusing words: "Asimov", "Gandalf", "toupees", "ligaments", "ankles", "joists", "cranes", "peppermints", "haddocks" and so on. I suppose there's more of a risk with an online support system since if it did give up and send to a human the text you entered as a description of your problem someone reading "haddocks" might be inclined to dismiss the message as spam but still...