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

Source: Slashdot

Issue Overview

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.

Timeline

• Last summer – Drake first noticed the issue and believed it had been resolved.
• January – A second, complete block went into effect, dropping Bing traffic from roughly half a million daily visitors to zero.

Attempts to Resolve

Drake 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.

Current Status

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.