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Neocities NSFW Kerfuffle

2026-3-7

by hétérochrome

Neocities has started tagging certain sites as NSFW manually as of recent. It led to users unrest with how sudden it all felt.

A Reddit thread1 spawned an entire companion website2 tracking the issue. Both calling on users to swap their site thumbnails for protest signs. But the move that might actually register is people quietly canceling their Supporter subscriptions. When the platform relies on those to keep the lights on, that kind of slow bleed matters.

Early signs and one prominent case involves a user Youtuube who had reported that their site was flagged with no explanation offered nor response to their requests for removal.

Any site gets that label in Neocities would vanish from the main update feed, basically drops off the radar for most visitors, with a possibility of getting the entire thing deleted without warning. The only way to see it is if someone manually append &is_nsfw=true to the URL, which hardly anyone does by accident. There hasn't been any warnings, notifications, appeals process, and not even published guidelines clarifying what even qualifies as "NSFW".

Getting lumped in with genuinely explicit stuff means these pages end up in the same bucket as material a lot of users have zero interest in. Even if Neocities eventually made NSFW browsing smoother, the association itself hurts. These aren't pornographic sites in the usual sense, but the tag treats them like they are, which pushes away potential readers and makes discovery tougher than if the site had never been hosted there to begin with.

On top of all this, it happened in a rather ironic timing. Not long ago, Neocities got delisted from Bing's index, about 1.5 million Neocities pages just gone. The operator Kyle Drake pushed back hard3 calling out the lack of communication, got some Hacker News traction, even pulled a response from DuckDuckGo on Bluesky.4 The core complaint was that these personal sites deserved to be findable and the opaque handling was unfair. So it was ironic when the platform turns around and applies a similar hard-to-see treatment to its own users with even less openness.

Neocities' Inner Machination

A site called Suboptimalism5 dug into how Neocities actually ranks and surfaces content. It's worth a read if you want to understand the mechanics behind who gets seen and who doesn't:

Spoiler: Allowed to Comment

※ to be "allowed" to comment, a site must be at least one week old and have been updated at least twice. i have not tested this but from the code, there appears to be a limit of 5 comments per day for users that aren't supporters. this limit may or may not apply only to comments made on other users' sites. there also appears to be a way for admins to manually ban sites from commenting.

Spoiler: Special Sauce Score

※ "special sauce" scores for sites are used in several places on neocities, most notably for sorting sites using the "special sauce" default sort on the browse page. special sauce scores are between 0 and 100, calculated by adding up the following:
-up to 30 points from multiplying follow count by 0.1 (so 300 follows are required to score the maximum in this category)
-up to 20 points from multiplying view count by 0.0001 (so 200,000 views are required to score the maximum in this category)
-20 bonus points if the site has been "featured". as far as i can tell this only applies to the 33 sites viewable here, which for many years were featured on the neocities homepage. the homepage now displays a random sample of the top 1000 sites, however it does not appear to grant them featured status when they appear there, as far as i can tell that can only be done manually using admin tools.
-up to 20 points from multiplying like count by 0.01 (so 2000 likes are required to score the maximum). unsure if it refers to likes given, likes received, or both. i doubt it would be likes given, though, because that would be easy to game (e.g. as occured during the Divsel Incident).
-up to 10 points from multiplying profile comment count by 0.01 (so 1000 are required to score the maximum). again, unsure if it is based on profile comments given, received, or both.
-there is then a 90% penalty for sites that have made more than 500k API calls (probably intended to catch automated sites), or have over 5 blocks with no followers, or have a block-to-follow ratio that is greater than 1 in 17.
-then a 50% penalty for sites that follow under five sites or have under 10 site files
-next a 50% penalty for sites with under 20 comments (unsure if based on comments given, received, or both)
-finally, there is a fairly-complicated multiplier based on how long ago the site was last updated. it favors sites updated recently, especially within the last day.

Spoiler: Global Activity Page

※ to appear on global activity page, a site must not be marked as nsfw, must not be shadowbanned, and must have a special sauce score above 2.

updated ※ unless browsing by tag, most sorts on the browse page only show sites above a certain minimum special sauce score. the requirements are as follows:

Findings here basically tell you that "Special Sauce" provides a reach boost. The interactions from paying users (likes, comments, follows) feed the visibility loop in ways that free accounts don't get. There's a hidden pay-to-play dynamic at work that doesn't get discussed much.

Go on and take a quick glance at the top-ranked pages, and it shows. The ones that stay up there tend to be the most active at gaming the system: mass following, bulk commenting, trading engagement, and leaning on Supporter perks to amplify everything. Whatever the algorithm was meant to do, it ends up rewarding the exact kind of performative social grind that Neocities was supposed to be an escape from.

Other Neocities Alternatives

Nekoweb comes up a lot as the go-to alternative right now. But it's still as small as Neocities is, so you're trading one set of uncertainties for another with the long-term reliability isn't a sure thing yet.

A customizable, code-first platform with a light social layer and hobbyist focus fills a genuine gap. Problem is, it doesn't scale the way big companies like, and the indie operators who do step up have a spotty survival rate. Neocities and Nekoweb are basically the main players, which means there's not much pressure to improve when users don't have many places to walk to.

Sources:

[1]. In Light of the Recent Neocities Bans / Archive

[2]. NeoCities 18+ Tagging / Search Visibility Concerns / Archive

[3]. Neocities's Blog Post: Bing Block / Archive

[4]. Duckduckgo's Bluesky Post / Archive

[5]. Website Archive

Special thanks to explorar, r/neocities, and Suboptimalism who was brought up by a user named Inatrous.