Post

Neocities
@neocities.org

Early this morning, we received an email from @namecheap.com that the domain neocities.org was being suspended because of a court order from New Delhi, India (a jurisdiction we don't operate in), which was for an unrelated court order about a sports streaming site on a different domain.

Neocities
@neocities.org

Our domain, neocities.org, was NOT listed in the provided court order document, but Namecheap took the report at face value and suspended the domain anyways, and told us "We have to resolve the issue with the complainant in order to have the domain unsuspended." As in, a legal firm in New Delhi.

Neocities
@neocities.org

Amazingly, we were somehow able to contact their office even though it's midnight in New Delhi, and they acknowledged that taking down neocities.org was a mistake and not what they wanted, and told me they are going to email Namecheap to try to get them to restore the site as well.

Neocities
@neocities.org

So the legal firm that sent the complaint -and- us are both trying to get Namecheap to unsuspend the domain, but as of this writing, they have not responded to any of the requests and we are trying all means to get them to escalate this to a higher priority.

Neocities
@neocities.org

At this point, we have no control over this, only Namecheap does, and Namecheap are the only people that can fix this mistake and unsuspend the domain. Until then, there's nothing we can do to restore service to the subdomain sites and the front site (the custom domain sites still work).

Neocities
@neocities.org

We are already on the phone with an enterprise domain management company and will be moving to a different registrar soon, but we can't even transfer the domain out of Namecheap until they remove the suspension, so either way we're still stuck for now waiting for Namecheap to do something here.

8 reposts323 likes

zarajohnson06.bsky.social
@zarajohnson06.bsky.social

That's the frustrating part of domain management when a registrar suspension prevents even the process of leaving. Hopefully, the issue gets resolved quickly so you can regain control and complete the transfer without any further disruption.

Neocities
@neocities.org

The internet is increasingly becoming dangerous to operate on because of crazy laws and orders like this. A bunk legal complaint in one country, which we aren't even based in, aimed at one alleged infringement issue, has just been converted into infrastructure-level damage against an entire platform

7332b.bsky.social
@7332b.bsky.social

This is going to become a bigger danger as time goes on, which is why a few sites have gone into the dark web. We cannot expect everyone to do that, but, this kind of nonsense might eventually force every site like Neocities to go underground. The registrar is showing poor form, very poor form!

Neocities
@neocities.org

Please accept our apologies for this outage. We will be doing everything in our power to restore the domain and ensure this doesn't happen again.

Neocities
@neocities.org

UPDATE: The domain has been restored. We are working on checking everything and making sure no issues were caused by the outage, but the front site and subdomain sites should be working again. Thanks for your patience.

Ivaalo
@ivaalo.bsky.social

Thank you for the follow up! I hope you'll have some peace, after that! If shitty people want to throw away Neocities without notice, we can legally make them pay for the premium membership we subscribed. If they want to play stupid games, then let's play stupid games, together! Support Neocities!

nephro 👁️
@feelingmachine.moe

there really isn't a better option than neocities is the thing; nothing that both is free and doesn't make me feel like my entire "account"/website is gonna randomly go under, permanently, at least

Alex
@alexm3d.bsky.social

Hey thanks so much for all the continued work ya'll do to keep Neocities up and running. It's my favourite corner/thing on the internet right now, and I love it with every bit of my heart. Godspeed in getting everything back up.