You're probably here from what I've posted in updates, so here's the short of it: on August 6th, 2024, a change was made that makes it basically impossible for sites created after that date to ever show up on the 'Last Updated' page (note: this is also affecting Random). More specifically, it uses your site's various stats (views, follows, etc.) to calculate a score, and if your score falls below a certain threshold, the site doesn't get shown.
This was an intentional change (i.e no one pushed a faulty update that just broke the page by happenstance), but I do not believe that the above was the intended result.
OK, so what can I do about it?
One: send feedback. If enough people express dissaproval of this change it will be reverted (though don't be a asshole about it). Neocities has a twitter account (handle @neocities), so you @ them publicly (though their account has been radio silent since April, so take that as you will. also, twitter's kinda bad). Neocities also has a dedicated feedback form here.
Two: use tags. Websites are not hidden when searching with tags. You should tag your own site with a popular, generic tag (like personal) and browse by searching for that tag.
Three: if your website still shows up on the page (fortunately, this is really easy to check), put something on your website (preferably somewhere visible) about this situation. Make your own post, link here, doesn't matter, just make sure that people can know what's happening and what they can do about it from visiting your site.
I think that this situation will be resolved quickly, so long as word of this spreads and doesn't languish on this site unseen and unremarked (admittedly, I am a little pessimistic on this spreading: this change went into effect months ago, and I know that I wasn't the first to notice, and yet I've seen very little mention of it). I don't think the people behind this change realize just how strong of an effect it has had, and will be quick to revert the change once they know.
That being said, what should we do if they don't. What if they ignore it, or even double down (again, this is NOT my read on the situation; don't take this as at all likely)? In that event, I'd consider moving off of Neocities entirely, or at the very least to stop engaging with the social media aspects of the site and find other ways to get people onto your own.
In the interest of getting this out as soon as possible and opted to add further details, such as how I found out about this and specifically details on the algorithm, later.
Two days ago, I pushed my first update to this site in months. A few hours later, I check back and see that my visitor counter hadn't ticked up at all (but it did quite a bit in the intervening months, though, which is good). Unfortunate, but not necessarily unusual.
The next day, I wrote a small post, put it out, and decided to browse the last updated sites a few minutes later. I quickly noticed that I couldn't see my site there. That was odd. There was no way that activity could have picked up so much while I was gone, right? Just to be sure, I clicked on a profile lower on the page. Sure enough, it hadn't updated since well before my site did.
Going back to the updated page, I decided to pay more attention to what sites were actually there. The first thing I noticed was that every single site had a relatively large amount of views (the lowest I saw was just above 6k).
With a bit of experimenting, I found out a few things. Going to the last page in Last Updated, page 17, and going onto the last profiles on the page, you'll find that the last few sites last updated years ago, with large time gaps in between them.
I realized that just how many sites were being filtered out could be estimated by looking at how many pages each search had. Sorting by New, the only one seemingly unaffected by this, has 3662 pages. Oldest has 83, as does Most Followed. Last Updated has 17, as does views. Random doesn't have a page count, but it is obviouly effected too.
As a sidenote, I'm pretty sure that 83 pages figure represents an upper bound on how many websites even could show up on last updated. Just 2% of websites aren't being hidden. (actually, it's probably even worse than that: see below)
At one point, I decided to search with one of the tags on my site and found that it did show up, so this issue wasn't affecting tag searches.
At this point, I was assuming that someone had recently accidentally made a breaking change to browsing and just hadn't noticed yet, so I decided to inform them via both twitter and the contact form. As of yet, I haven't gotten a response from either.
I hadn't seen so much as a peep about this yet, so I decided to go to the Neocities github to see if there was anything there. It took a little bit, but I eventually found this issue from August.
To my surprise, this wasn't only already known about, but had been an intentional change. From what they said, the intent was to prevent low quality bot pages from cluttering up the search. There is no indication that this person realizes just how strongly it suppresses most websites. There are recent comments pointing out just how bad it is, but they likely haven't been seen yet. (also, the issue was closed in September, it needs to be reopened)
The issue page also helpfully points out where to find the actual changes, so we can see specifically what does and doesn't get hidden. Lets go through them.
Search Parameters
Each way to sort a search filters sites in a slightly different way. To list them out:
- Special Sauce: Only shows sites with score >1 unless searching with tags.
- Random: Only shows sites with score >3 unless searching with tags.
- Most Followed: Only shows sites with >10,000 views, updated within last 9 months unless searching with tags (note: 'unless searching with tags' only applies to 2nd condition here).
- Last Updated: Only shows sites with score >3 unless searching with tags, has to have updated at least once.
- Newest: Only shows sites with >100 views unless created by admin, has to have updated at least once.
- Oldest: Only shows sites with score >0.4 unless searching with tags, has to have updated at least once.
- Hits: Only shows sites with score >1.
- Views: Only shows sites with score >3.
- Featured: Only shows featured sites.
- Tipping Enabled: Only shows sites with score >1 unless searching with tags, has to have tipping enabled and a valid place to tip to entered.
Now, there are hints, but this by itself doesn't really tell you how brutal the filtering actually is, since there is no context as to what score is. Lets rectify that.
Score
Score is a value that is calculated based on your account's stats. The max possible score is 100. It is updated once per day.
I'm leaving out a few of the minute details in how its calculated (null checking, for example, or individual terms being capped at a certain value) for the sake of brevity. If you really must know them, check the code yourself. Here's the formula for calculating it:
score = ((follows*0.1 + views*0.0001 + 20 if featured + likes*0.01 + comments*0.01) * (0.1 if api calls > 500000 or blocks/follows > 0.06) * (0.5 if following <5 or site has <10 files) * (0.5 if you made <20 comments)) / (time since updated in days^0.3)
It's actually pretty variable due solely to the last term, but that's probably going to net you a 2x increase at most unless you specifically time an update right before score is recalculated.
Still, it's absolutely brutal. To put it in perspective, the absolute highest my score could be as of right now is 1.4. Even allowing for a margin of error of 100%, getting onto the Last Updated page is a pipedream for me as of now. And that's for a site that's been up for a while now; imagine how much worse it is for new users.