[HN Gopher] Neopets.com Changed My Life (2019)
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Neopets.com Changed My Life (2019)
Author : bariumbitmap
Score : 19 points
Date : 2025-11-19 01:24 UTC (5 days ago)
(HTM) web link (annastreetman.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (annastreetman.com)
| Ancalagon wrote:
| I had a very similar experience. Writing the HTML to spruce up
| the homepage of my Neopets guild was my first introduction to any
| website creation or programming.
| nemothekid wrote:
| Every once in a blue moon I'll meet someone who can trace the
| genesis of their career to neopets. I learned to code from
| neopets. It started from html, then I fell into a cheats crowd,
| where I learned Visual Basic (some of the best early cheats were
| in Visual Basic).
|
| Then one day, a guy coded a program in Python. It was only one
| with a "modern" style (it used Window XP styles, while most VB6
| programs looked like windows 98 programs), and it used threads so
| it could watch multiple stores instead of having to manage
| multiple processes.
|
| I must have been 12-13, and I was completely floored with it. I
| was convinced everyone programming in VB6 was wrong and the
| future was Python. I eventually self taught myself Python just to
| write my own cheats, which I eventually sold to others for
| millions of neopoints. Then my account got frozen and I moved on
| to other games.
| cj wrote:
| Same here!
|
| I'm in my mid-30's now. In high school I learned HTML because I
| really wanted to customize the styling of my Guild (I think
| that's what it was called).
|
| And then built a neopets fan site and forum which taught me
| basic business (trading links with other fan sites,
| hiring/managing forum moderators, and eventually sold the fan
| site during junior year).
|
| The will to customize my MySpace profile was also a driver for
| learning HTML.
|
| I sometimes think about this in the context of today's highly
| controlled platforms that simply don't make space for users to
| customize or do anything outside the platform directly.
| EddieB wrote:
| I followed this exact same path. Started with HTML for guilds,
| learning to slice PSDs and ended with learning VB6 to develop
| auto buyers / adopters :D Slopdog forums was my inspiration for
| using VB I think?
| mvcosta91 wrote:
| Ragnarok Online private servers communities did pretty much the
| same for me. We were very die-hard on PHP, MySQL, C and ancient
| JS/CSS.
| prodigycorp wrote:
| neopets also changed my life. some a-hole stole my account and
| after that, elementary school me became deeply conscious of
| infosec.
| natdempk wrote:
| Neopets was also my first introduction to any sort of
| programming. Customizing your shop and guild pages with basic
| HTML and CSS was the first programming I ever did. I remember
| fondly adding MIDI music snippets as well that you could copy-
| paste in, all to increase the curb-appeal of your shop so you
| could sell your omelettes.
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