NeoExtreme

Note: This is not proofreaded at all. I wrote this when I was kind of sleepy too!

I am neopian_master12399. I am here because I know extremer. Although I may appear as staff on NeoExtreme, I deny it. I never applied or participated so I would not consider myself staff. I do not contribute regularly neither.

So why am I here? I know extremer, the owner of the site. He's a nice guy, and I wanted to help. He gave me some administrative powers and I add things here on there at random occasions. You may see me on the forums occasionally as well.

My Neopets years started around the January of 2000, approximately 2 months after Neopets had gone public online. A small site, Neopets was slow and boring. I played for some bit and eventually left the site, moving on to other things.

After a year had passed and Neopets had become slightly more known and popular, I returned to Neopets interested in what was new. I started my own guild called "The Advanced Guild" eager to let it grow and became popular. Unfortunately, it had practically no members and was a dead guild. It had a Flash intro (in the days when <object> tags were allowed) and a website. The guild was a sad existance and was very inactive.

Sometime later, I started my own Harry Potter guild on another account hoping that this time it would be a success. It had around 50 members and was marginally successful. It had a website, a lame Flash intro, and the usual. I recall the days advertising the guild continually to the Neoboards and to players but the guild never grew much bigger. After a while, I closed down the guild and gave away the account.

After all of this (around New Years 2002), I decided to create a new account named "neopian_master12399" so that I could join a guild while keeping my original guild intact. I searched the Neoboards and came across a guild named "Phoenix Rising" run by a player named sheep10 (who happened to know and talk frequently to one of the staff members). An advertisement by one of the members compelled me to join. The guild was only a few days old and I decided to help. I had previous website creation skills dating from 4th grade so I decided to give it a try. Eventually, I built the website, started creating designs for the guild's front page, and did a ton of other things. The solution to the lack of a free webhost was solved by installing a web server on sheep10's computer. It provided for the situation very well. Eventually, the guild grew to around and peaked at 100-200 members. Never stale, the front page changed many times to many themes such as the "Lost Desert" and the "Battledome" all with their own little clickable Flash world (very similar to the Flash worlds on the Neopets Explore pages).

The guild itself had many features from the usual: a web-based "television" channel, a live radio, live help (which no one used), a small virtual pixel image world, a mobile-accessible interface, and a thousand other things I could continue to list. The guild spanned into other accounts too, providing alternate front pages (via different accounts) and other things. The main front page even had a cool transparent guide that floated around and led you alone (which was soon followed by advertisements of the very same nature very soon on the Neopets Pet Central page).

Around this time, I discovered how to use Javascript despite it being filtered: placing language="Javascript" bypassed the filter from removing the Javascript. As a result, we were able to display a nice welcome message that showed the user's location. This was eventually blocked after they found out and no one was frozen.

Eventually, I left the guild because I was fed up with sheep10 (and soon after I left, the guild started falling apart). I joined with one of the members of Pheonix Rising to create Aeons of the Final Fantasy (AOFF). I learned some PHP around this time and installed some phpBB forums. The guild never grew too much and was eventually disbanded after a move of the guild from an account to another.

To write later: The Neopets Safe guild by maxiemumu(?)

By this time, near the end of 2002, sheep10 had started his own Neopets fansite that grew from Pheonix Rising. There were not that many Neopets fansites as now by far; new fansites did not pop up so rampantly as now. The site stood a fair chance and manifested itself into a relatively large Neopets site. Interested, I joined and helped by creating the website, managing different aspects, and doing site related graphics. The shoutbox was a popular place after I installed it and I and other members would hang around it very frequently. It was very fun. There were many memories from the place. One of the problems though was the impersonation of staff (this was before the days of popularized forum and site integration on Neopets fansites). The issue was solved by, initially, asking staff to occasionally putting some secret BBCode that printed a lame (but unreproducable by normal means) banner that said "I'm staff!" It wasn't used often and it was here that I thought of prepending star images to staff's usernames (and this idea soon was borrowed and used on a lot of Neopets fansites that appeared soon after) and this settled. Fun times.

At the time I joined Neohero, it was hosted by Something-Now (a large Neopets fansite that went away soon after December 2002) but eventually captured its own domain as "Neohero.com." No doubt was Neohero growing in popularity quickly. It had a lot of graphics and designers. Around January 2005, sheep10 decided to hire a new web programmer and I decided to leave. I took my bags and left.

Abercrombie who knew Adam (the Neopets Adam) and was one of the staff on Neohero that was fired(?), had went and created his own Neopets news site. I discovered this and talked to him and joined NeoNewsNow. The layout, a simple green one, was replaced by a new green Quiggle-oriented layout that I made. I contributed programming, graphics, and helped managed. I finished up my skinning engine that I had started on Neohero (but never let them have access to it) for NeoNewsNow. We were in secret(?) competition with PinkPoogleToy to bring out skins first. I finished it and soon we had a wreath of skins ranging from Mystery Island to even Pokemon. I, unlike on Neohero, started participating on the NeoNewsNow forums and befriended a lot of nice people (who changed some of my thinking too).

NeoNewsNow became a very popular and famous fansite. It was one of the best sites for Neopets news. Before the site and forum integration of news, Adam would occasionally actually visit NeoNewsNow and post on the comments page of the news (and I had his IP! =O). Due to the great traffic, I lured a lot of the visitors in to the forum and as a result, the forums bustled with people and became active. It was great times. NeoNewsNow was the first Neopets fansite to offer a very comprehensive card database before the TCG game even debuted. The site had its share of other features too such as graphics.

Months passed and I eventually left to have a break. I was on considerably less. The site started declining a little though (not in traffic though) and suddenly one day, Aber decided to close the site. It was nearly out of the blue. The forum was in chaos. Many people were made administrators and screwed around. The site was disabled one or two days after the initial announcement. I downloaded a backup and that ended NeoNewsNow.

To do: KAF

Jenn: It's Banana boy!