Neopets is still around

https://www.dualshockers.com/neopets-is-still-active-2023/

by novia • 3 years ago

134 105 3 years ago

I have a lot of good memories of neopets. I didn't go on the boards like a lot of people, but I loved clicking around, getting items, and playing the arcade games for money.

(thank goodness for the giant omelette in dino land because my pet would have starved otherwise)

Having gone into webdev and software, I wish I could go back to then and pop the hood of the site. Maybe even generate some free neo points from the arcade games...

pbj1968• 3 years ago

I can’t believe the author wrote an entire article about neopets and refused to install a free browser downloaded in seconds that would work with it.

tavavex2• 3 years ago

Assuming that your users will have Flash is not a reasonable expectation to have in 2023. It's strange that the website didn't use one of the Flash emulators like Ruffle, instead relying on the users to install the very obscure Pale Moon browser and Flash itself. I agree that the author could've gone a bit further to test the Flash stuff, but really, this is representative of how 99% of other normal users would act as well.

Nursie2• 3 years ago

The site has since relaunched, and does use a flash emulator to bring some of the stuff back now.

Nowhere near 100%, but my partner was able to play some of the old games recently.

tavavex2• 3 years ago

While I've never used Neopets before, it seems like the kind of game that has a relatively small, but very dedicated community that's willing to come back year after year.

syndicatedjelly• 3 years ago

https://www.neopets.com/help/html1.phtml

Neopets was how I learned HTML and CSS. As a kid I just thought that this weird language was how you make pages in Neopets, but then I learned that this stuff works all over the web! Fun times

quxbar• 3 years ago

I came here to say the same thing!

robotnikman• 3 years ago

Same here! I remember using it to customize my shop.

dirtmerchant• 3 years ago

I can’t believe someone wrote an article about Neopets without mentioning the founder, Doug Dohring’s, ties with Scientology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doug_Dohring

tvb12• 3 years ago

I heard about that in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI5cu3G5oXk

I may not remember it correctly, but I think the two original creators of the site ran out of money and were recommended to a group of investors who happened to be Scientologists.

add-sub-mul-div• 3 years ago

I don't see anything there about it except that he is one. Is there a story I'm missing? To someone who doesn't believe in any religion, it doesn't make sense that his should be called out and not someone else's mainstream but equally supernatural religion. Either we shame everyone for the silliness and crimes done in the name of their respective religions, or no one. It should be the latter.

burnished• 3 years ago

Don't know this specific human from Joe but scientology deserves a call out, it is active and entirely predatory. Same deal with other religions really, they just get more specific call outs by region.

ethanbond2• 3 years ago

You should watch Going Clear. I'm critical of ~all religions, but Scientology really has achieved a unique mixture of scale and awfulness.

serf• 3 years ago

generally speaking it isn't the supernatural beliefs that are called into question when one considers scientology, but rather the fraud/abuse/criminality that is related to the church and its' management.

The time in which the Catholic church itself acted like an international paramilitary/intelligence organization is largely over, but that may or may not be the case with regards to certain other religions.

KennyBlanken2• 3 years ago

"Silliness"? How about a history of murder, doxxing, and harassmentv of its critics and ex members?

Hubbard founded it on a bet and then it took on a mind of its own with his death, becoming a tax haven and a cult - one of the most dangerous, prolific, and virulent cults there is.

Stop and consider for a moment that someone who is nose-deep in such an organization is aggressively expanding into literacy and education platforms for young children - the age where religious and cult indoctrination is most successful. Recruitment plunges when the age of exposure is after critical thinking skills are developed.

Obviously he would not directly attempt recruitment, but I guarantee there's more than just "he wants to be a good dude" going on. As another commentor noted, he tried to get scientology shit into Neopets.

AlotOfReading• 3 years ago

Well, it's certainly not irrelevant. Scientology principles were used to manage the company and employees were partially evaluated on their friendliness to it [0]. It wasn't ever a major part of the content because of internal resistance by people like the other founders [1].

Managements' religious preferences can have a meaningful influence on how an organization operates, e.g. Hobby Lobby. I don't see why it'd be out of bounds here when it's legitimately relevant to how Neopets was run.

[0] https://theoutline.com/post/4190/neopets-was-run-by-scientol...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/neopets/comments/26fwhh/i_am_donna_...

micromacrofoot• 3 years ago

scientology is a cult from the top down, more blatantly than many other religions and a lot more centralized

ars2• 3 years ago

Because it isn't a religion. And I don't mean because I don't believe in their specific beliefs, but because it doesn't act like a religion, it acts like a con artist business.

Have you heard of any other "religion" that charges huge amount of money for access to their teachings?

mrguyorama3• 3 years ago

mainstream but equally supernatural religion.

Scientology is verifiably and comprehensively different from most other non-cult religions by virtue of how it treats it's members and encourages them to act. Only one other religion of note has such "High control group" style features as discouraging psychiatry, discouraging interaction with non-Scientology family members, forcing through threat of blackmail members to do things, threatening the IRS and getting away with it, and generally treating members as resources.

primax• 3 years ago

You can't believe people are having a discussion without bringing up religion?

FrankoDelMar• 3 years ago

I believe he is highlighting how Scientology is more of a grift than an actual religion. I would be more concerned, all else equal, if a Scientologist was President than if said President was American Protestant or Catholic.

edit: It could also have to do with Scientology’s history of child sex abuse

patmorgan23• 3 years ago

Scientology isn't a religion it's a cult/grift. For decades they were denied the tax status of a religious organization because they didn't meet the legal test until they mounted a decade long infiltration and harassment campaign to which the IRS eventually relented.

bashmelek• 3 years ago

I think it should be mentioned that the actual creators of Neopets are Adam Powell and Donna Williams, who apparently were unaware of this connection https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neopets

Sebguer• 3 years ago

There are still sustainable, pay-to-play MUDs. No one should be surprised that Neopets has clung to life!

donatj• 3 years ago

Gaia Online is still around. That shocks me. They've done basically nothing to update anything in years, but they're still kickin'

I had friends who were super into it in the early aughts, but I mostly just bought and sold stuff on the market to make money.

Izkata• 3 years ago

Tibia is ~6 years older than Gaia Online (1997 and 2003) and is also still going, though I assume they've been updating it. I stopped playing Tibia during college with the intention of restarting afterwards, but my account was deleted for inactivity and I never went back.

_annum• 3 years ago

Apologies for the rambling post, but hopefully it sheds some light on the continued existence of the site:

Gaia has been a bizarre and largely unwelcome fixture in my life for almost 20 years. It taught me basic market fundamentals (and led to early experiments with HTML, CSS, coding, and graphic design) but it was also my first brush with internet addiction, and I suspect it contributed to the development of ongoing stimuli-related executive dysfunction. The remaining users (primarily adults) seem to exhibit similar tendencies and/or other psychological issues.

My parents hated it. Having been exposed to gambling mechanics [0][1] from a young age, I would never allow my children to be exposed to anything similar. I sometimes jokingly think of myself as an early casualty of the loot box era. Thankfully, few games have this effect on me; somehow this one remains uniquely addictive, a kind of perfect and insidious formula.

The history of the site is an interesting case study in digital currencies, user retention curves, and the collapse of early social media. After a corporate buyout and subsequent mass exodus, it was largely dormant for years until being purchased and revived by the original lead developer.

Many parts of it are completely broken and abandoned. It's a UX nightmare, extremely cringe, and basically needs to be gutted to have any hope of attracting new users. But a small, dedicated, and vocal user base remains. If the fundamentals are correct, sometimes people will stick around, even if management decisions are continually at odds with what users want. It helps that the items are also the best they've ever been, drawn by talented pixel artists who probably used Gaia when they were teenagers.

I still have immense respect for the original incarnation and vision of the site. It emerged directly from the dotcom fallout, and was created by a small group of anime artists/programmers hacking away in a communal San Diego bungalow. It's one of the few relics of my childhood left on the internet, and I suspect it will be around for years to come.

[0] https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/835/640/c54... [1] https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/956/433/66c...

mrguyorama3• 3 years ago

Such a reality is the DESIRED end state of every "free to play" type game, as it's waaaaay cheaper to nurse and milk a few thousand "whales" who will spend tens of thousands (whether they can afford it or not) on literal trash because they are addicted.

primeradical• 3 years ago

Gaia had a hyperinflation problem because they let people purchase gold generators with real money. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/hyperinflation-in-gaia...

superkuh• 3 years ago

Part of this is due to it being written in Perl. Perl programs don't stop working after 3 years like what happens in many other languages. In some ways Perl's unpopularity saved it from this fate.

mostlysimilar• 3 years ago

I'm fairly sure it's PHP?

cnees4• 3 years ago

Where do you get the idea it's written in Perl? The pages end with .phtml, which is a clear marker of PHP.

thomasfromcdnjs• 3 years ago

I would to know if there any Utopia (created 1998) players here?

https://utopia-game.com/shared/

https://mud.fandom.com/wiki/Utopia_(online_game)

I believe there is about 2000 active players still.

Played a few ages a couple years ago, thinking about kicking back in.

It is complete nerd warfare, imagine 25 with people warring 25 other people through spread sheets in a fantasy context.

It probably has the hardest learning curves of any game ever made, but the community is really strong and encouraging.

aidenn0• 3 years ago

I stopped playing when I had kids; it requires too much round-the-clock availability if you don't want to let your teammates down.

Fnoord• 3 years ago

I played both Utopia and Neopets back in the days around 2000-2005. I still have screenshots!

You could submit it to HN and see if there's uptake. There's also Algolia.

The beauty of Utopia was that you start a province and you get together with max 24 other players in a kingdom. You vote which province becomes your king or queen, and you gotta work together with those other provinces. If it doesn't work out you can leave, but it comes with a penalty.

However even back then, trading, botting, and account sharing was rampant. Because it was an international game with people around the world, and sometimes you had to log in the middle of the night. And people had RL, too.

The cool thing about Utopia was the politics aspect. War, negotiations and all that. The dark side of it were pacts and people who resort to mentioned cheating but who also bullied to get on top. It is probably akin to Eve Online in that way (which seems way more complex).

It probably has the hardest learning curves of any game ever made, but the community is really strong and encouraging.

Nah, not the hardest. Utopia Angel (which ran through Wine) made Utopia fairly easy cause it was an accurate combat sim, and later on there were Web 2.0 frontends for scraped/normalized data, and also sims available for the province non-combat features.

Neopets I started because the woman I fell in love with digged it. Honestly I thought it was kind of cute and akin to a browser-based MMO (like Utopia was, too). The market is just like in WoW auction house; a sim of its own kind. But the fondest memories I have regarding those massive puzzles they sometimes had. They were an adventure within Neopets, and an adventure into studying your browser and things like Flash. WoW also has a MMO puzzle adventure going for it right now. For WoW, my fondest memories are action related and MoP expansion (yes I played before MoP, even WC2 and WC3 when released). Although MoP also was my low: I got a psychosis from the stress related to requiring high performance.

grose• 3 years ago

Neopets taught me HTML. I might have never become a developer without it. It’s crazy to think that letting kids shove some raw HTML into a text box could change lives. I bet MySpace has similar stories.

shepherdjerred• 3 years ago

Same! I remember there being guild websites or something which led me to learning HTML/CSS in 6th/7th grade! This and Minecraft were huge influences on me.

malfist• 3 years ago

Same story here. I remember learning html through w3schools for my neopets webstore

open-paren• 3 years ago

Same. Learning HTML for Neopets sites directly led me to my current job as a programmer.

maxverse• 3 years ago

Same!!

xp84• 3 years ago

Raises hand Yup. It was LiveJournal for me and my friends.

cnees4• 3 years ago

Me too. To this day, I love finding Neopets-compatible HTML and CSS tricks to use on petpages. For a while, I had a fully functional chess game running on a petpage. It would play against you using stockfish and everything. But then browsers stopped sending the full path in image request referer [sic] fields, and the jig was up.

TheHappyOddish2• 3 years ago

I wonder what the equivalent is today. How do kids start hacking away at HTML (or does anyone learn HTML now?) by being tricked in by games or social media?

clearleaf• 3 years ago

Dissapointing that they didn't bother getting flash to run. I stopped reading when it settled into a pattern of "I opened this page and it didn't work. Then I opened this page and it didn't work either." Of course it didn't! What is the point?

cnees4• 3 years ago

Neopets has a Ruffle integration as of very recently to make games run. Most of the non-game flash elements have now been replaced with SVG or HTML5. The site is very far from refurbished, but there's been a lot of progress.

novia3• 3 years ago

https://portal.neopets.com/news/sept23-flashgames

They're working on fixing it apparently

keville• 3 years ago

It was just relaunched a couple of months ago, after this article was apparently written. No clue if the site is any better or worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36785450

Nursie2• 3 years ago

From what I've seen (my partner and some of her friends dived back in after the relaunch announcement) they have some more of the flash content reimplemented in non-flash tech or emulated, so it's a bit less dead than it was.

And also the metaverse thing and nft project has been cancelled. AFAICT this is largely due to outcry from the community.

minimaxir• 3 years ago

Neopets had extremely impressive and robust sitewide puzzle events: https://www.neopets.com/space/npv2_solution.phtml

That one in particular actually discouraged me from learning code scripting as a kid because it requires deobfuscating PHP code which definitely was not a kid friendly thing in 2004.

chipuni• 3 years ago

Up until June 30, Neopets had been owned by Jumpstart Games. They didn't do much with their IP.

The IP has been purchased by "World of Neopia", who have $4 million to modernize and re-open Neopets.

Source: https://people.com/neopets-launches-new-era-website-7563280

novia3• 3 years ago

Their main user base is driven by nostalgia. Hopefully their attempts to modernize don't go so far as to alienate their existing users.

Right now they have a god awful synthesis of three types of GUI wrappers for their webpages, so as you navigate across the site nothing stays consistent. Sometimes the language will randomly change to Spanish. It's website gore.

If they would spend the money to create a consistent user experience across all their pages, not introducing one page at a time, but actually biting the bullet and pushing the change across the whole site, that would be a step in the right direction.

gslin• 3 years ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20230911235150/https://www.duals...

decafninja• 3 years ago

Admiral is disgusting. Is there any way to get around it in iOS Safari?

late25• 3 years ago

Is that the anti-adblocker? Reader Mode works.

xzel• 3 years ago

I learned how to program by writing auto buyers, bots that would buy specific items that had a higher value on the secondary market, for Neopets. I believe the farther I went was deobfuscating the API they used issuing points for their games and making fake game players. I was part of a bunch of Neopets automation forums where people would bot and then RMT (real money trading) gold and other items. Neopets basically had 0 security and would really only ban people when their checkout speed sub 1 second. Everything I wrote was in VB6 and then eventually VB .Net basically killed the scene I was in since the initial .net roll out was so poor, as well as people growing up. Hadn't thought about this in forever. Thanks Neopets!

herpdyderp• 3 years ago

I got into web dev because they didn’t sanitize your bio. You could stick whatever HTML in there you wanted! (Maybe they stripped out script tags at least, I don’t remember.)

Edit: looks like others in this post had similar experiences :)

bennyg• 3 years ago

I have the exact same experience. I got “reputation” by creating a daily do-welled that would collect np by automating all of the daily tasks. That let me into the private bb forum channels that had the auto buyers, captcha solvers, etc. I look back on those memories fondly - I must have been 10-11 years old then and was amazed at the skill disparity for the auto buying programs - constantly had the rarest stamps. I’m pretty sure all of my accounts were banned, including coveted short nicks like “bg”.

jaimex2• 3 years ago

I got into hacking/pen testing by hex editing the Flash games and disabling hit colliders.

Daegalus• 3 years ago

I did something similar. I would write bots to play the games, then eventually figured out I could just hit the apis that would give me items and gold. Eventually, I had a lot of rare stuff and so on. I kind of wish I could still log into that account. But I doubt I would remember the username, email, or anything else.

spondylosaurus• 3 years ago

You might be amused to know that Neopets still has dismal security 20 years later. Autobuyers are alive and well, to the point that the entire virtual economy is shaped around a handful of exorbitantly wealthy users who snipe and hoard valuable items.

There's also at least one grey hat (reddit user u/neo_truths) who's been able to get into Neopets' databases and expose how broken the site is and how much cheating runs rampant... real interesting stuff.

EDIT: Here's a fun example. Ancient bug where items above a certain rarity level weren't available in NPC shops, despite Neopets' staff insisting that they were... turns out r100s were in fact buyable, but not visible, so the only way to snag one was to figure out the exact URL for the item as it was generated.

https://www.reddit.com/r/neopets/comments/npzffe/restocking_...

https://www.reddit.com/r/neopets/comments/nu4k5o/r100_restoc...

weird-eye-issue• 3 years ago

A few years ago I randomly had the idea to spend a few hours to see if I could find any vulnerabilities in Neopets

It was a bit nostalgic for me since I originally learned HTML/CSS from Neopets over a decade back

Within 30 minutes I discovered you could create any Neopet, including the limited edition ones like Jetsam, just by setting that name in the API call

superhumanuser• 3 years ago

Made me think of GigaPets and how they're still around!

https://gigapets.com/

ChrisArchitect2• 3 years ago

FYI may 2023 article

Some more recent neopets discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36785450

ChrisArchitect2• 3 years ago

And this profile from August

Neopets is finally in its revival era

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37147379

crumpled2• 3 years ago

I was already in my 20s, so arguably too old for neopets when I discovered it and was subsequently banned.

I found a flaw in an archery game that would allow me to always bullseye. It would only work in Firefox. I didn't have to do anything outside the normal interface.

I guess they decided to ban every archer that did too well. It was fine. I didn't feel compelled to try and return.

matthewtse3• 3 years ago

I remember that same bug! It was something about timing and angle that always resulted in a bullseye. Must have been pretty simple for me, a 10 year old, to figure out.

I never got banned from it though. But I later forgot my password and moved on from my comcast.net email address (there were no password managers back then), and grew up, so effectively the same thing.

crumpled2• 3 years ago

I feel like you had to shoot the arrow straight up or off screen and it would glitch out and appear on the target.

dankwizard• 3 years ago

Didn't the removal of Flash ruin their online games catalogue?

EamonnMR• 3 years ago

The removal of flash ruined the entire online games catalogue, not just theirs.

mym1990• 3 years ago

Neopets was one of my first exposures to web development, in the sense that you could customize your guild home page in a pretty open ended way using HTML and CSS. It felt like simpler times back then haha.

matthewtse3• 3 years ago

Neopets was my first exposure to the "stock market".

It was a very simplistic market where there was a price floor of ~$5, and prices would randomly go up and down from there (it was not based on buying and selling, it was a simple random walk generator). So it taught me a very simple lesson of patience and delayed gratification, where if I simply bought stuff at 5, and waited a few weeks/months until it went up to 15-25, I could sell with a high profit.

As I acquired more "capital", I could make bigger purchases with bigger payoffs over time, and I made far more buying and selling these stocks than I could ever have performing "labor" (playing the games for points), thus teaching me the second lesson on capital leverage.

I think a few years in, they realized people were doing this, and they added a purchase floor of $15, where you couldn't buy something unless it was $15 or more, which limited my ultra-simple strategy's profitability, but I still kept doing it for a few more years before growing up and moving onto other games.

A final funny anecdote, there was this one stock called BOOM (Boom Boom Boxes), which would very regularly shoot up in value to 100s -> 1000s in price (way beyond everything else which typically topped out in the 10s). And there was this strategy to always buy BOOM when it was cheap, because it would surely multiply like crazy. And one day they announced that BOOM was the first stock to go "bankrupt", resulting in everyone losing a ton of money as it went to 0. Thus teaching me the third lesson about "bubbles".

I'm astounded I remember this much detail from a game I played when I was 10 years old.

Huggernaut• 3 years ago

I was one of the lucky 2,000 players to receive 500,000 neopoints as part of the billion neopoints giveaway in 2000. I was 11 and some time later gave my password away to someone claiming they would make me a moderator so you know... important lessons were learnt.

brailsafe• 3 years ago

And sometime later that password would probably show up in the leaked list of user accounts that's easy enough to find, since they stored everything in plain text

quickthrower2• 3 years ago

This sounds so much like modern cryptocurrency. They were ahead of the curve.

allo37• 3 years ago

It was my first exposure to...scalping? I remember that for some reason, chocolate was very valuable in the game. There was a chocolate shop in the game that was consistently sold out, but if you hit refresh often enough and at the right time, you could catch it right when it "restocked" and nab one of those rare chocolates. Then I would sell it in my personal store at a tidy profit.

Timing the refresh just right and grabbing a super valuable chocolate was quite a thrill, probably even more than the games themselves.

matthewtse3• 3 years ago

Ahh, I remember something similar.

I remember there was a "secret fairy shop", which was a hidden clickable link. And the shop was usually empty, or stocked with low-worth items. But every 1 hour or so it would stock with high-value fairies that can level up the power of your neopet, and these prices were always significantly below market. Kind of reminds me of Rolex :)

I remember reading guides as to how to time the purchase. I'm kind of surprised more enterprising users didn't write bots for this, as I always remember it being possible at human reaction time to actually pick something up, which I imagine would have been impossible if bots came along.

londgine• 3 years ago

I was young when neopets was big, so I didn't experience all of the aspects of the game. but I do remember that when signing up, it asked my age. After answering truthfully, I was told that I need my parents to sign a document for me to play. I obviously wasn't going to do that, so then I learned one of the most important things about the internet, it is okay to lie.

bastardoperator2• 3 years ago

A long time ago, I worked for a company that had a cage in the 818 Pihana/Equinix datacenter in DTLA. Neopets also had a cage in this DC and they made it obvious it was Neopets which wasn't something a lot of companies did.

What I'll never forget though is that they had pink, purple, and aqua colored CAT5 cables when everyone else was using your typical blue, yellow, and red. Today it's probably not a big deal, but back then it was wasn't something you saw in any other cage, everyone stopped to take a peak, new people always asked about it, and I always thought it was super cool even if they had to crimp everything themselves.

They had a fairly sizable cage and I passed by it everyday. I never played the game, and I was having my own kids by the time I started working in the DC, but that's my tiny personal Neopets nostalgia story and anytime I come across someone who also worked at 818, they remember it too.

TheHappyOddish2• 3 years ago

If you know anyone with pictures from the time, I (and I assume everyone here) would be super interested in seeing it.

bastardoperator2• 3 years ago

I do not sadly, there was a no cameras policy in the DC, and interestingly enough this story pre-dates the smartphone. Damn I'm getting old...

hnbad• 3 years ago

Somewhat tangential but the consent popup on this site (when visiting in Germany at least) is interesting.

It is blatantly illegal of course, by giving the user no way to simply disagree to all with a single click (one has to instead select "purposes" and save & close from there). And it also does the usual misreading of the GDPR where the purposes dialog offers you to individually opt out of "legitimate interests" (which is not a thing: legitimate interest is not consent-based so if it can be opted out of, it's not a legitimate interest by definition). It also front-loads a ton of analytics and other garbage that the GDPR clearly requires consent for and it should therefore not load before you opt in.

However if you just save & close the purposes dialog without opting out of anything else, the site will simply not serve you any ads. Instead all ads just show a placeholder. So despite all the attempted dark pattern shenanigans and half-assed consent seeking the site doesn't even benefit from it properly because it will apparently do almost everything the GDPR is meant to protect against but then not show you ads.

I doubt this is intentional, but it seems like the worst way to implement this in terms of profit. The lack of ads means no monetization and the fraudulent consent dialog means it's deliberately violating the GDPR. All the risk for no reward.

novia3• 3 years ago

Neopets used to officially support translation into languages besides English. Now it does not. I wonder if having to comply with international laws is the reason they backed off.

cnees4• 3 years ago

Oh I know. I never left.

Neopets is still around

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