It's an odd feeling to see your whole childhood catch fire.

Confession time: from about ages 11 to 17, I was addicted to Neopets. I was absolutely rabid. My brother got into it first, then my sister, then me. I got my real life friends into it, and it was my first "real" experience being online by myself (before that, the closest thing was sharing my mom's Helbreath account).

I collected all the avatars it was possible to get, and tried in vain for years to get the Faerie Wheel one. I had a high score and trophy from Dubloon Disaster before they pussified it and made it too easy.
I was there when Altador was introduced and participated in the first Altador Games (ROO ISLAND REPRESENT).
I followed every "make 1000 NeoPoints a day" guide religiously, waited--sometimes for hours-- at the magic shop to upsell product and market snipe the shit out of the marketplace.
I was there when all the Petpets vanished on the site and were found at the Giant Jelly in Jelly World and saw the first site-wide story event.
I submitted crappy pet fanfic writing to the Neopian Times and drew terrible fanart of my pets and had a pet page of "screenies" where I screenshot all the funny random encounters, or humorous glitches I came across and commented on them via MS Paint doodle version of myself with fox ears and a tail.

I was a huge fucking dork.

When I was about 16-17, though, my interest faltered. This was because I discovered Runescape and Gaia Online. My friends and I moved on to other things. The time between my logins grew longer and longer. Eventually, I couldn’t log into my account at all; when you’re gone for too long, the site asks for the birthday you signed up with as well as your password, and since I had been under 13 when I created the account (meaning that I couldn’t legitimately post on the boards), I had lied about my age. . . which meant I had no goddamned idea what my birthday was.

I wasn’t too heartbroken; the rules had been changing and getting more and more constricting. Swearing wasn’t acceptable in any form (even “crap” could get you into trouble). You couldn’t have custom backgrounds anymore, and they introduced a pay-system called “Neopets Premium” which was ten kinds of shady, even to Impressionable High School Zeph. I more or less forgot about Neopets.

That is, until the fucking Neopocalypse happened.

So here is a rough timeline of events:

Neopets was made by some British college kids in 1999 for other bored college kids. It got sold to Viacom back in 2004, which was when it started getting super little-kid-y. People complained that the place was going downhill, and maybe it was, but it wasn’t anything gamebreaking.

Then, in March of 2014, Viacom sold the site to JumpStart, that little company that makes educational shit for kids. Among other things, JumpStart said they’d be making a mobile app (which was desperately needed) and try to get the site to be more interesting for the older audience that had stuck around since the early days. There are/were a surprising number of people who got into the site when they were young and stuck with it, even to this day.

However, in September, JumpStart moved the site off the comparatively cushy Viacom servers and onto their own, resulting in a number of problems including: Major lag, people being told that their correct passwords were incorrect, the site being taken offline temporarily, pets not rendering (as in, only body parts would be visible), user homenode equivalents called “user lookups” getting glitched and going down, then staying down for months.

The shops glitched out and stopped selling things, Key Quest (a game that uses real money) getting taken down with the assurance that it will be brought back “within a week or so” and never returned, the Biweekly “New Features” news site got padded to shit and nothing got done, and basically the place was a wreck for a while. At one point, the whole site went down for three days, and when people logged back in, they were given a rare item as an apology. . . only for the previously highly prized, 1.5 million NP item to suddenly drop to 30k a pop, pissing off original owners and marketplace keepers.

At the same time, a rumor goes around about how much Jump Start might’ve paid (or not paid) for the site, but it’s nothing official. However, it still gains traction and has people muttering in dark corners.

This continues until March 6 2015, where the majority of the Neopets Team was laid off. Majority as in “everyone but a ‘handful of programmers, along with the support team and the monitor team.’” This includes not only the behind the scenes people, but well-known long-time public members of staff like the Neopian Times editors.

Finally, in June, JumpStart did away with all the forum moderators (many of whom were actual employees who were paid to sift through the shit Neopians produce and uphold the strict forum rules) and put in a word filter instead.

The
site
went
insane.

Like,
fucking
bugnuts.

Not only did the filter not work to block out shit in the forums, it also didn’t work for naming pets, meaning there is now a flood of pets in the pound named all kinds of weird shit.

See, part of the thing with the forums is that not only is there no cursing, but there’s absolutely no discussion of anything sexual, religious, political, or drug related. As such, the word filter —already woefully inept for words alone— could do basically nothing to stop users from posting whatever batshittery they wanted. And these aren't just troll accounts created to take advantage of the fun, these are actual, sometimes long-standing users who are risking throwing their accounts away for the sake of sticking it to Jump Start.

This went on for a few days, then the site was shut down, only to be brought back sometime this morning or last night.


People online have been calling this the "Neopocalypse." That name is probably inaccurate, but it is fun to say. While the repercussions of the last few days haven’t fully hit yet, hopefully this will be a sign to JumpStart to start taking things a little more seriously. The site isn’t going to end anytime soon provided nobody does anything insanely stupid —again— and there’s still a huge fanbase.

Of the several accounts I had back in the day, most are gone now. I don’t know if they were deleted for inactivity or what. There’s one still around, but I don’t know the birthday for that one, so I can’t login. However, I’ve heard that the userlookups are still down.