keiwo

Just in case someone I know finds this..

Hiya guys!

I'm not sure if this is the kind of request I'm allowed to post here, but I've recently hatched another Draik, and to my dismay, it hatched as a female (I already have a female Draik and really wanted a male one :~(). I figure the easiest way to switch her to male is to battle the lab scientist and hope it changes her gender. The only problem is that I don't have the lab map and to be honest with you, I'm not willing to shell out for it haha. I was wondering if there was anyone on here with the lab map who would be willing to take my pet temporarily and battle the lab scientist with her to see if you can get her gender changed. It'd be much appreciated :~)

I usually back Roo Island but I'm planning on giving Maraqua a go this year! :-D

Tell me about it! There aren't many online communities that are as friendly as TDN. I'm a member of quite a few and people are always flaming each other and causing drama because they have nothing better to do. Even when I play online games (like League of Legends) I find that people are way too ragey and should probably go outside and chill or something lol

Thanks a lot, guys :-)! I have about a third of the responses I'm after and about half of them have come from TDN (according to my collector stats). I wasn't expecting to get many at all so this is great!

Good luck getting your account back. I was unfairly iced a couple of months back and never even got a response to my ticket :-(

They are both friggin' beautiful! Gimme dat Alabriss!

I'm doing a survey thing for a mini-study I've decided to conduct (the earlier I start, the better, right?). It's a short survey and doesn't ask for any personal information. It asks questions about your demographical info, musical preferences, and includes the requirement of completing a few self-assessment questions. You certainly don't have to do it, but it would be a great help to me if you did! I'm not offering prizes or anything - the reward is feeling good because you've helped someone :P

Here's the link: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/5RZLK77

I dunno.. sometimes I suspect that there might be some that they let fall by the wayside because they're so swamped with them (or at least I hope that's the reason). I've submitted at least 2 perfectly reasonable review scores that were never accepted (nor rejected), and others that took over a week to be reviewed.

Yep, I'll most likely be renewing my subscription. I love the Super Shop Wizard and the 5 pets thing is just a huge bonus :-D

this is actually appalling.. I can't form a coherent opinion but lol wow way to compromise the integrity of the site!!!!!!!!!

I feel like a loser saying this but I CAN'T GET THE GADSGADSGAME AVATAR. I have the likes of Ice Cream Machine, Staff Smasher and Meepit Juice Break (all of which I found easy to get) but I just can't seem to score high enough for the Gadsgadsgame one, despite it supposedly being one of the most easily achievable game avatars..

I understand that the reviewing process is necessary but I think the benchmarks need to be reconsidered.. along with that, I've seen some friggin' crazy scores slip by without the user getting frozen. I'LL WORK FOR YOU AND REVIEW SCORES, TNT, JUST SORT IT OUT

I'm usually a Roo Island player (although that isn't reflected in my user lookup.. ;p) but I think this year I'll make a bit of a change and jump in with Maraqua. It is my favourite land, after all!

.. what would it be?

In light of the release of the Elderly Paint Brush, I went looking for my favourite user-created paint brush page and found it (here). Some of them are pretty friggin' cool if I say so myself! I'd fully paint my Lupe ninja ;p

ETA: I also love the world-themed colours (Shenkuu, Brightvale etc.). Huge fan of the Fire/Ice PB design too!

You'll notice that some of the colours on the page have since been created by TNT, too :O The Maractite design looks almost exactly the same!

I knew the elderly paintbrush would be released sometime soon after that big kerfuffle about the player who won one from the vending machine and never received it. I don't think I'll be using it on any of my pets but we'll see how it looks on other species!

tl:dr: If you really care about Neopets, read my post please.

 

Obviously they don't want it to happen. It costs them money. Regardless, Viacom is a multi-billion dollar company. $14.9 billion in revenue last year with over $2.1 billion made in pure profit. Neopets is currently the 5,733rd ranked site on the internet, usually somewhere in the 4-8K range. That's way too much money for a company to make and not be able to keep a site with that kind of traffic online. They don't seem to want to spend the money it would take to make the site more reliable. And no, it's not reliable. This happens all the time. Glitches? Indeed. All over the site, all the time. Some which have existed for years. As a premium member that actually pays money, it's even more frustrating. I'm quite sure there is a rise in traffic due to the "Scores Galore" weekend, and if I know that, surely they should. Plus it's not like this is the first time they've done it, so I'm sure they're aware.

 

And customer service? Forget it. I've never had a ticket replied to or had any questions answered. Even the premium support is basically nonexistent. I even had an incident where a man (predator) sent my young daughter very unsettling neomails. It was like pulling teeth to get this guy frozen and get the legal ball rolling. Of course she too lost her account that she'd worked so hard on for years even though she did nothing wrong. Only thing I asked the legal team for was to please inform me as to how the legal aspects were going... finding the person, charging and prosecuting them, etc. Of course I never heard anything further. Seems crazy that as a parent I had absolutely no recourse but to depend on Viacom to do something. I had no way to go after this guy on my own and make sure he was brought to justice. He made new accounts as well. Hopefully they were all banned, but who knows? He could very well still be on there somewhere. His wife's account is still active. His wife who wouldn't believe me even when I sent her screenshots of the neomails.

 

Google, Facebook, Yahoo, YouTube, Amazon all have sites way more busy than Neopets and I have never seen any of them down. The last month statistics are available (March 2012) Google.com had 176,255,305 unique monthly visitors. Neopets had 765,170. The sad thing is that number has been steadily going down for years. Perhaps there is a reason for that? I personally ran a website consistently ranked in the top 40K that contained no ads and was paid for out of my own pocket and yet my uptime was a lot better than Neo's. Same thing at another site where I was the forum administrator. That site was consistently in the top 2K. Also, with both sites we had shared offsite hosting. We sure didn't have our own data centers.

 

I understand you want to take up for the site as you obviously love it, as do I, but more people really need to say something instead of always giving them a free pass. Constructive criticism is good. In short the site needs a massive overhaul. The coding is clearly in bad need of optimization. The many constant, nagging glitches need to be fixed. Obviously when needing to report such abhorrent behaviors as the one I listed above the process should be much easier and there should be follow ups. Customer service needs a vast improvement. Perhaps they need to hire a large amount of temporary workers to help do the job. Seems like they need to hire more people period. In general it seems the site is maintained, ran and updated by a skeleton crew. If they'd need to take the site down for a few days or even a week, to overhaul it, I'm all for it. Unfortunately that's not likely to happen. Corporations tend to be very short-sighted. They only think about how much money shutting the site down would cost them. How much it would cost to bring temporary coders and programmers on board. The extra money they'd have to spend to keep some more customer service people, coders and programmers on staff permanently. They don't think about the fact that it would bring people back to the site over time. More people to read ads, more to sign up for premium, more to buy neocash. Instead of the number of people visiting dwindling, it would actually increase. In the long run, they'd make their money back and then some. Not only that, but the players, old and new, would be much happier. Even TDN would benefit as more people would be here as well!

 

Neopets has been dying for years. It may not be that apparent to some, but the statistics do not lie. It is something that saddens me greatly. It is something I want to see change. Please, if you truly care about the site do something to try to encourage Viacom to invest in the site as they should. Email them, write them, call them, whatever. Heck, make a Youtube video and address it to them. I know there are others that share my feelings. However, the voices of a few can be easy to ignore, but the voices of hundreds, even thousands can be quite attention grabbing.

 

Sorry for the novel. I just needed to get that off my chest.

 

 

tl;dr: If you really care about Neopets, read my post please.

this was a really, really good post lol. everyone should read it

They're really not going to scrap the NC Mall. If they did it would place somewhere in-between conversions and new YYB for rage.

Still loading very slowly for me. I can load a few pages in chinese but not much at all :|

there's no way they'd scrap it because it makes them money. wouldn't it be lovely if they just made all the NC wearables buyable with NP and abolished NC entirely?! ;p

loading painfully slow for me, I've given up for now

I got it, too. Nothing to worry about! :-)

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Two, despite people's claims that marijuana has never killed anyone, driving while high HAS killed people.

driving while sober and completely free of drug-related influence has also killed people. driving is a hazard exacerbated by alcohol and drugs - that's unavoidable.

I've found that the majority of opposition towards marijuana (including in people who smoke cigarettes and drink) is bred by fear and hatred of illegal drugs in general. while it's true that marijuana is illegal, it cannot rightfully be compared to the likes of heroin and cocaine. I don't smoke weed anymore (got over that stage of my life by the time I was 16.. I guess I'm just not a vice sort of person) but I think it's absolutely ridiculous that cigarettes and alcohol are legal while marijuana is criminalized and stigmatized. don't get me wrong; I've known people whose lives have been completely taken over by weed and it's not a good look, but alcoholism is far more of a concern to me.

here in NZ there have been a lot of legal marijuana 'substitutes' released. they're all chemically produced and generally have the same taste, smell and effect as the real thing. a few of the substitutes have been recalled and pulled from the market due to people having unseemly reactions to them and also because of the presence of potentially dangerous chemicals. I think it'd be far more reasonable to just legalize the real thing than try to replicate it and thereby produce products that are far more dangerous than natural marijuana.

there is, of course, the issue of how to legalize it after it's been illegal for so long. it would certainly take a lot of effort to keep everything under control - probably more effort than government and law enforcement are willing to make at this stage. I'd be for it, though I feel like it'd be hugely abused here because the majority of people I know who are smokers are truly complete and utter morons, and I don't think they need their access to dope made any easier.

inventive ways people have already done this, i think there is a dispensing machine in New Zealand? can't remember the country, but in order to avoid the drug dealer charges they have one of those convenience machines in the cafe instead of a person handing out. The cafe in question no longer runs courses on how to grow the stuff because the police were being really disruptive and i think the owner got arrested 5-6 times and released with minor-no charges.. read the article sometime this year.

I've read about 'Cannabis Cafés/Clubs' here where people go to just chill and smoke. I think some of them are pretty well left alone by the police, but I do recall reading something similar to what you've summarized.

that suuuuucks. I get really angry at that error even when I've submitted a score that isn't for an avatar.. hopefully next time you try you'll get it again no problem :-)

I've seen other sites get DDoS attacks, and they also DO NOT LOAD AT ALL, like what is happening to Neopets right now. So, I'm just going by observation, and curse you, Anonymous, I'm SURE it's YOUR doing!

I don't think DDoS attacks are causing the downtime, least of all DDoS attacks by Anonymous. They're morons, but they don't often take sites down for no reason whatsoever. I would say it's just a widespread issue with the Neopets servers/database.

P.S. I'd just like to add that last time there was downtime, I wasn't affected. It could have something to do with localized DNS servers, too.

yeah, my friend and I started playing it back in primary school in around 2001 :-) she's quit for good now but I'm still trucking on haha

Thanks for the scratchcard link! My webmail has stopped functioning entirely :-(

I've just created mine on my side account :-) I'm not a huge fan of Hissis but I'm sure I can find something cool to do with mine!