Neocities Founder Stuck in Chatbot Hell After Bing Blocked 1.5 Million Sites (arstechnica.com)
- Reference: 0180749738
- News link: https://it.slashdot.org/story/26/02/06/2027244/neocities-founder-stuck-in-chatbot-hell-after-bing-blocked-15-million-sites
- Source link: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/neocities-founder-stuck-in-chatbot-hell-after-bing-blocked-1-5m-sites/
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.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/neocities-founder-stuck-in-chatbot-hell-after-bing-blocked-1-5m-sites/
As bad as cloudflare? (Score:3)
This sounds almost like normal life for me, but cloudflare are the offenders, not bing/Microsoft. Censorship on the Internet, USA style.
What - people still use Bing ? (Score:2)
I thought that Bing was dead - just a placeholder to change after you installed Windows (who knew ?)
Re: (Score:2)
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: (Score:2)
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 (Score:2)
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?
Nobody uses it (Score:3)
Dont worry, nobody uses bing anyway!
low-quality content (Score:2)
If that was truly the reason M$ should block their own msn homepage.
This doesn't sound bad... (Score:2)
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
Welcome to the future (Score:2)
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.