The Neocities Error 404 Bug (Patched)

August 8, 2024

Recently, links to live chat interfaces have been returning 404 errors due to a bug on Neocities. This issue occurs because the backend server fails to automatically serve the index.html file when a folder is requested, leading to the 404 response. This means, when requested, https://iframe.chat/embed returns a status 404 (Not Found) but https://iframe.chat/embed/index.html returned a status 200 (Success). This is unusual activity because both of these links should behave the same and point to the same document. Also, requesting a folder with no default document specified generally returns an error 302 (Bad Gateway). Regardless, I've changed Chattable's code to utilize the URL that currently works. This means, old embed chat links looked something like this,

https://iframe.chat/embed?chat=000

will now look like this,

https://iframe.chat/embed/index.html?chat=000

Notice we're adding the highlighted part to the old URL essentially. But if you want to do this faster and are the owner of the chat, you can follow these steps:

  1. Go to your Dashboard (You may need to login)
  2. Find your chat, click the pencil icon
  3. Select "Copy Link"
  4. Replace the source URL in your websites iframe with the new link that's copied on your device.