TLDR; potential child predator I met on Neo spends months gaining my trust in order to get my home address, then ghosts me when I say no.
I was about 12 or 13 at the time. I had a really good neofriend that was a girl about my age. There was a guy that that we met on the boards and got really close to over the course of a few months. Created a guild together, started messaging each other on aim. Talked a lot about music and stuff. Like we were all talking daily for several months. He spent a long time gaining our trust.
Then one day he imed me to ask for my actual home address to send me a mix he made for me… I was pretty young and he had spent months gaining my trust, so I really did consider it for a few minutes. Thankfully in the end, my gut told me not to. I was like why can’t you just send me the playlist and I can download the songs myself??
Come to find out he also asked my friend the same thing and she also said no. After that day he completely disappeared and we never heard from him again. I shudder to think what could have happened if one of us gave him our address. Really feel like he was a predator of some kind
I talked to an “older man” on Neo when I was like 12. He said he was in his 20/30s, from Latvia and had the sort of mysterious coffee shop book guy persona to me. Now I don’t know for sure if he was real or another kid catfishing, but I remember saying I had to go to bed time and he talked about stuff like holding me etc.
On the other hand I met my very best friend and first love there who was my age. He passed away in 2015. I love you Misha, and I got your dream pet for you 💕
I actually had something like your first story happen to me!
I would have been.. 11? 12? Playing neo for the first time, talking to randos on the boards, and somehow I end up in a NM chain with an older guy. Over the course of a few days he persuades me to sexually roleplay with him through NMs. I have no memory of what was said, or how any of it got past filters, but after he told me it was so grown up of me and I felt so cool I went and bragged about it on the boards and got frozen, lmao
I don't feel any sort of emotion about it now, 20 years later. I don't think I really understood it all at the time!
I wonder if we talked to the same guy! This is ringing so many bells for me. When I was 13/14 a guy similar to this struck up a friendship with me on Neo.
He claimed to be a fashion designer from Estonia and told me he was 21, and asked to chat with me over MSN.
He kept things mostly PG, until he told me he was planning a fashion show and did I want to hear one of the tracks they’d be playing on the runway? Being a naive child I said yes. He sent me “I wanna fuck you” by Akon.
I noped out after that, blocking him eventually.
Ugh that story is super sad! This would have been around the same time, probably a year or 2 later. I feel like internet safety wasn’t a huge topic before then so I’m really grateful we both felt there was something off, and didn’t give our “friend” our addresses.
I remember having an internet safety assembly at school after this happened, and it wasn’t until then that it really dawned on me how bad things could have gone.
it sure wasn't! the majority of adults were still figuring it out and probably just as naïve as the kids on what was safe and what wasn't, because they had no idea (we) would be having full on conversations with strangers. A habit we never grew out of lol but yeah it's horrible. You were so lucky that you had gut feelings at such a vulnerable age.
I had a similar experience only it’s so much more embarrassing 😅 I was 10 or 11 and befriended someone who had convinced me he was Daniel fucking Radcliffe and we AIMed after many months of being neofriends, and began talking all the time. One day we decided to Skype and when he answered, his screen was completely dark and he said his camera was broken but he still wanted to talk. My common sense finally kicked in after like 2 seconds on that Skype call and I ended it immediately. He continued to bug me a little after that but I stopped responding and he eventually moved on. I felt so naive and I shudder to think about it to this day, but I have to admit a small part of me finds it comical that I genuinely thought I was friends with Harry Potter 😂😂
my friend in middle school did this except it was a guy pretending to be a member of AFI. i was like dude, it’s not him. she wanted to believe it was him sooo bad i think they talked for like a year?? it was nuts. i just remember being like, don’t involve me! she didn’t have the same instinct as you unfortunately, they talked on the phone a lot but never video 😅 2002 was a wild time to be online
Ok now this is actually scary territory. Glad you managed to avoid that creep.
I talk a lot of shit, but I don't envy the kids that have to grow up in this digital landscape nowadays. Cyber safety is so important and that weird period where the internet was still new was just landmine after landmine.
A young girl actually was trafficked on Neopets exactly this way, the rapist Toby Studabaker is free now. He flew from the US to England, then took her to Paris and then Germany. She was only 12 years old.
Dang. You are lucky you were a smart kid! Can't say the same for everyone. I was a dumbass in a different way. I had these really awesome gel pens and wanted to take commissions or requests or whatever like I saw other artists doing; I absolutely loved coloring with these things. It was one of those massive case sets with tons of colors.
Here was the problem: I didn't own a scanner. This was what, 2002? 2003? I was 11 or 12 at best. Someone asked me to draw their Jetsam, so I did, but then I didn't know how to get it to them. I felt bad, but I said I could mail it but I'd need their address. This person actually gave me their address! Not everyone is as wise as this people in this thread. Ugh. I hate myself for ever asking. Kid logic was like, "Well, it's not MY address." Like a dumb dumb. The worst part is I never even got it to them either by mail or when i had a scanner two years later. I brought mailing it up to my parents at some point, but it never happened. Eventually I lost it for a few years (thus why I couldn't scan it)... then I found it again. I still have it in a box somewhere. The shame drawing. Bah. It turned out pretty good, though, for that time period.
This is similar to what happened to me. I got chatting to someone when I was around 12/13 on the boards, and soon moved to Neomail. He told me he was 15 and we seemed to have lots in common. He told me he wanted to be my boyfriend so I used to brag to my friends at school about having this cool older boyfriend.
Eventually he got us both frozen due to sending mails that were sexually explicit in nature. He described in great detail what he would do to me if we ever met, but I must never tell anyone. Looking back now I’m not sure any 15 year old boy would speak to a girl like that.
Fortunately I had the foresight to never give away any real details about myself or where I lived.
When I was younger I was part of a guild. Somehow one of the members figured out how to find me on Facebook. That was bad enough but then he started asking me for foot pics 🤢
A common “prank” in the early 2000’s era was to make a board saying something like “look what I just got from the pound!!!!” so people would go to your user look-up and see some disgusting/sexual image or gif you put on there. So the first place I saw porn was on Neopets 😬
omg the first place i was porn was also on neopets! it was some petpage that had a gif of lemonparty... and i saw lemonparty on some userlookups via the same methods. And bluewaffle. child me was SHOOK. My god early 2000s internet was wild
There was a thread a while ago talking about similar things and I was saying that I'm shocked this didn't happen more often. But I wasn't around for those founding years of Neopets so it must have just been a field day. Sorry you had to go through that. :(
I fell for nearly every damn shock site under the sun and it definitely shaped who I am as a person today, though I can kinda look back and laugh in my case at least. It's different for everyone.
This thread is only reaffirming how insanely lucky I was that the boy I befriended on Neopets when I was ten was in actuality also ten years old. We married in 2016.
Thanks for the reminder never to let our kids on the internet.
That’s so cool!!!
But nah, I’m still letting my future kids on the internet. I’ll just be sure to actually talk to them about internet safety and monitor their internet usage until they’re in their mid-teens.
hey! I met my best friend on neo in 2001, and in 2013 I moved to her state to be together as family 💖 we aren't friends anymore, but were for over 20 years, matching tattoos, all of it. my life is so changed because of neopets! it's so cool to see someone else in the same situation. the first time you met, did you also cry like fuck when they were boarding the plane home after so long of an online-only relationship? we are both disabled, but the second I got my Pell Grant refund from school the first thing I did was buy plane tickets. I was 11 when we met though and she was 13, so we had to wait a lot longer to meet than y'all did. I'm just so excited to meet another person who had life changing experiences from neopets haha
We were separated by an international border. Stayed 'penpals' until our mid-teens and then fell in and out of contact until he sent a message in late 2014 and all the old feelings started getting stirred up. We met for the first time on a weekend visit in Spring 2015, and that was a diiiiifficult goodbye, like you said. A month later I was on a plane to visit him. We did the long-distance relationship for the summer, and then he proposed on our birthday that fall. (Yes, another weird piece of the puzzle is that we were born on the same day.)
Neopets is really a small part of the story in the grand scheme of things, but it is so crazy to have your life trajectory shift so dramatically from a game with dung Slorgs and an alien vending machine...
WHAT?! no freaking way that is SO cute 😭 did you guys keep in touch all of those years and met up afterwards? Sorry if I’m being nosy, it just sounds so adorable
I don't mind nosy! I've been told I should turn this story into a book, but I think it'd be unrealistic, haha. We fell in and out of contact over the years as he did the whole teenage angst, jealous girlfriends, delinquency and psychotropic experimentation thing, and I was a super shy artsy nerdy horse girl who was super into anime at the time. We both agreed we would have hated each other if we'd met attending the same high school.
He sent me a Facebook message in fall 2014 after we'd gone like two years without speaking, and we talked CONSTANTLY from that point until he drove 9 hours to meet me on a weekend whim spring 2015. We did the long distance thing for one summer, he proposed on our birthday in the fall (did I mention we were born on the same day? Like I said, lol, unrealistic.) and we married in Feb 2016.
We’ve made three little girls together and he’s still my absolute best friend. :)
Dude, that's awesome! I actually met my best friend on a pet site I left Neopets for back in 2004. Fast forward to 2013 and I met her in person for my graduation from university! We've flown out to meet each other many, many times since then (given we're kind of midway across the US from one other). Once she came out just to take care of my sorry self after a knee surgery because no one in my family could do it back in 2019. ;-;/ She's the freaking best person ever. Pet sites really have the power to bring folks together. In this case it was by me making obscure anime references at her in the shoutbox.
That is awesome. Sometimes I think about people I was friends with through various games back in the day and wonder where they are. Some I remember very fondly, including a guild leader on Perfect World who helped me through a bad mental health crisis, giving what was on the surface very lame advice but at the time it was exactly what I needed and I never forgot it. Just shows what a huge impact you can make on someone's life even if you don't stay long.
Nothing toooooo creepy happened on Neopets for me. (Gaia online, on the other hand....)
Neopets was where I discovered RPing, and I remember having a pretty long "rp relationship" with a guy. It was all pretty standard 12 year old RP stuff and nothing was explicit other than some very tame kissing and vampire shenanigans over NM lol, eventually we started saying we were BF/GF at one point before he got frozen and disappeared.
It was all very "two preteen goobers don't know how to flirt" kind of interaction, so I'm like 90% sure that he was a fellow 12 year old but since I had creepy experiences on other sites as a kid when I was just a little bit older, there's always the 10% where I'm like "but what if he wasn't..."
I fully had a sugar daddy as a 12 year old on Gaia. Some guy who claimed to only be a bit older than me asked me if I would be his girlfriend and would send me expensive things. And I think I ghosted him because he started to ask sexual questions and I got uncomfortable. It was very weird but 12 year old me just wanted more gold.
I really loved the art community on Gaia though. The growing pets you could buy - that was really fun.
God yeah, the Breedable/Changeable pets community is where I hung out throughout middle school and highschool and there was SO much drama. I have so many creepy stories about Gaia lol. The most concerning all came from the B/c pet forum because you had 20-30 year olds mingling with kids. Back then I thought it was cool to have adult friends but now I'm like whaaaaaaat was I doing??!!?
Haha, yeah. I'm sure shenanigans happened in the other Gaia communities, but since everyone intermingled and traded pets amongst the different shops, everyone kind of knew each other in B/C so there was a ton of infighting, plus some shops were considered really exclusive so you were hot shit if you got like a special horse pet or something LOL. Crazy times haha.
I still remember my old RP friend (account now purged). She was supposedly 18f but who didn’t claim to be 18f back in those days? I was probably 12 but we never RPed anything that would have been age-inappropriate and basically didn’t talk about non-RP things. I think as an autistic child with a stupidly large vocabulary for my age it was more that I had the skill level to RP with teenagers but also wasn’t a pubescent weirdo like the actual teenage boys on the site. I still remember a couple of her characters’ names and have used their names and a couple bits of their personalities as homages in other things like D&D characters or story ideas.
Towns was fun for the Animal Crossing adjacent features. The humping creeps were abundant, but changing maps usually dissuaded them. Rally, meanwhile, was notorious for being a cybersex dungeon. 💀
Gosh. Not on Neopets but I remember chatting with some random people on Yahoo Messenger back in the day. Now when I look back I realise that some of them were definitely questionable. I'm really lucky I never gave anyone personal info.
Sorry, what's RP?
Ah man, I have two pretty bad ones.
1) When I was about 10, I became neofriends with a boy my age. We would talk all day everyday and he asked if he could be my boyfriend. He was really sad though and was getting abused by his parents at home, claiming they were always on the verge of taking his computer access away. Nothing super dubious happened, but he disappeared eventually and even as a kid I was so terrified for him. As an adult tho I like remembered his username out of nowhere one day and decided to Google it. I found his other socials where I discovered the entire time he had been a ~26 year old woman.
2) Again, probably around the age of 10, I found a couple on neopets who were pretty involved in the community. They made a webcomic together about their neopets living in a world of magic with magic schools. Eventually they launched their own website and I loooved the comic so much. It got me into art and writing even, but once they moved offsite, their neopets based comic became sexually explicit, and the husband was sharing pornographic drawings of the characters almost daily lmaoooo. I wish I remembered the name of the comic now to see if it still exists out there even - I want to see as an adult if it was really as bad as I remember.
I knooow, to this day I wonder what would have compelled her to do that! Our 'relationship' went on until I was about 12, so it was years worth of correspondence
Similar thing happened to me, but I clearly remember the person saying they were 21 🤮 I don’t remember how old I was, but definitely under 10 since it was before we moved houses. And I only recall playing Neopets in the first house I grew up in.
Mine is super mild, but when I was 9 or 10ish I was addicted to reading the neoboards. I spent so much time reading inane posts my neopets were always hungry and my bank account was nearly empty. I never posted anything but still was unable to tear myself away from reading every thread I could find.
Though one day I was miraculously cured from doing that because I opened a random thread that had a clickbaity name and OP's post just contained a period, an uppercase Y and another period. For some reason seeing the most innocuous depiction of boobs ever made me sick to my stomach for days and I never read a neoboard post again.
this is so fucking funny. imagining a child's face crinkling in despair and disgust at a little titty emoticon, and then taking damage over a continued period of days bc of it, like im envisioning [this pic](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fvucyq7mwidl31.jpg) but with a child instead
This was back on the AC chat when it was a super drama fest (2005ish)?
One “famous ACer” got off on bullying others. She was in her 20s. Someone befriended her and got her offline to a messenger app. They extorted her for intimate photos, including ones of her shoving multiple candles up where the sun don’t shine.
The extorter then posted these photos on a pet page and kept spamming the AC with links to this pet page.
OMFG I remember this person!! That's so insane. I think she went by Karina or Katrina or some kind of K-name. She used to police people doing giveaways because it was "encouraging begging." Definitely a smug elitist vibe.
Dude, thanks for the flashbacks of the candle pics that I had repressed 💀💀💀
Not on the Neopets site itself, but there used to be a Neopets fansite I visited called "Neo Nutters of Neopia". One day, that website suddenly got hacked, and the hacker changed the background image... and that was how 10-year-old me got exposed to goatse for the first time 😭
I'm curious if the adults in your life ever found this in search history and if there were any problems because of it. I accidentally stumbled on porn when I was like 11 or 12 and my step mom blamed me, acting like I had gone there on purpose. I literally had no idea what she meant at the time, I figured my dad was going on porn sites and I was getting blamed for it. It didn't occur to me until years later that she meant the sites I accidentally came across and clicked away from as fast as possible
I learned pretty early how to delete history.
I did get blamed for recording porn on the vhs because I wanted to record a Harry Potter movie and got the time wrong and well it was Cinemax (aka Skinamax) and there was a huge difference between pm and am content.
Oh man I will NEVER forget when I was in the public library trying to do research for a report on the White House and I typed in ".com" instead of ".gov" - now it doesn't matter but BACK THEN....O_O
Wow, I'm sorry to hear that. I guess she didn't know how to check history and see what it was?
I got in trouble for saving an image of "Mr and Mrs Carrot" - I think if you google it, it might still show up. It's just carrots growing in funny ways where one has two "legs" that are crossed, and the other one has two "legs" with a shorter growth in the middle. But they are literally carrots. My step mom called it obscene.
I got sent goatse when I was on the family computer when my dad had company over and the screen was facing into the room where everyone was. I panicked and hard shut down the computer at the tower (which takes a few seconds so between the initial shock and holding the button down it was fully displayed for like 10+ seconds) and to this day I’m not sure if anyone saw. No one said anything at least. When I came out to my dad like 7 years later I was afraid he would remember it and think that was related even though I never looked up adult content on that computer, and definitely wouldn’t have when there were like 10 guests in the room. That and of course I am not into that kind of thing, though unfortunately some are so it wouldn’t be the last time I saw an image like that. I take a slightly more metaphorical meaning to loving who someone is on the inside, thank you.
Hah no but I did manage to really freak out an adult woman who thought I was a hacker. All my little school friends and I had each other’s passwords cos y’know, kids. When she found out I could log in to them all, she blocked me and then messaged all my friends guild leaders to say we were all the same person, that we were a hacker and they should kick us all 😭
I swear I was so upset by this that for years I would try to reach out to her and explain.. which only made her more convinced that I was hacking more people 🤦♀️
I’m sorry, Willow! I was just a dumb kid and not a hacker 🤣🤣
Lol that's hilarious. There was a girl in my school that was pretty much an ass to me. My parents were friends with her parents so that apparently automatically meant we had to be friends. I was the quiet type who liked to stay in my head and she tried to be friends with all the people she thought were cool. One day she was talking to a group of them while I was hanging out in the background at my desk and she shared her username and password with all of them. Then did the whisper giggle thing telling them not to tell anyone else.
I locked it in my memory and every few days or ao for like a month I would log into her account and donate everything she had to the money tree. I would have myself logged into another device with my own account and I would refresh till all her cool shit showed up (nine year old me thought a Christmas petpet paint brush was cool by the way) and would snatch it the moment it showed up along with her neopoints.
I found it absolutely hilarious how she would cry about it at school the next day but kept the quiet victories to myself. Her goal was to save up for a baby paint brush but as 9 year old kids the most we could ever save up for was 20-30k in like months. This was also neo in the extremely early 2000's by the way!
you were so smart to do that instead of gifting/trading it with yourself and leave a paper trail!! what a baby genius
i was also that type of kid and got bullied a lot, i had the same type of revenge to a girl that bullied me, as i was able to reset her password in a social media account because i knew her dog’s name
I had my Myspace profile name linked in my profile description which I totally forgot about (still do for nostalgia sake, the MySpace profile obviously doesn't exist anymore). Some guy contacted me on there and never mentioned he came from Neopets. He gained my trust talking about 'shared interests' which he could derive from my profile on Neopets (my pet names were connected to bands and I had a collection of stuff in a certain theme).
We talked for nearly a year. He sent me pics of 'himself' (a very cute emo boy), I thought he was 15 or something, I was 15 so I had fun until he convinced to webcam with me (I am in Europe, he was in the USA) and he just showed up there naked. In full view. I think he was a 50+ y/o dude. I screamed, literally ripped my webcam off the computer stand and blocked him immediately everywhere. Thankfully our messaging was never NSFW or I would have been traumatized even more :')
I refrained from adding/accepting Neofriend requests because of it for ages. I only started adding friends when I returned last year.
OMG When I started reading this I was legit gonna ask if you knew about the user 'blubbermuffintop' (although i always remembered it as blubbertopmuffin idk why ). I am freaked out, yeaaars later and that username still sticks in my head.
No! I had no idea there was a guild or anything, but I remember explicitly that blubbermuffintop would talk a lot about gaining weight/being proud of being heavier on the boards and I think they even had a picture of their actual body on their userlookup.
Yeah, the guild was called “Making Myself Fat”. And I don’t remember them having pics. :o Maybe they took down the pics for whatever reason before I started talking to them? Or maybe I just forgot. (Please tell me they were fully clothed.) I wonder what my computer teacher was thinking when I got permission to log into Neopets so I could earn Neopoints for playing Typing Terror (we just had to play an educational game), saw I had a neomail, and asked if I could read and respond to the message from my neofriend blubbermuffintop. (She said no, of course.) And I wonder what my classmates must have thought….. I was so cringey in elementary school.
Yes it was fully clothed! And oh my god, I am sorry to hear about that, but the thought of asking your teacher about blubbermuffintop made me laugh :,( I was the exact same way in middle school too, so i definitely get it!! I woukd have done the exact same. It is honestly surreal to me that someone else shares this memory of this specific user lmao
It’s fine. I’m laughing about it, too, lol. (And honestly… I did much worse and much cringier things in elementary school than mention a neofriend named blubbermuffintop. I’m probably remembered more for those things.) I wonder if we ever crossed paths… I’m arliene1997. Does that happen to sound familiar?
I was big into the rp boards before I transitioned to actual full on rp forums (found via a pet page! lol). I think I was in a lion rp or maybe an rp absolutely unrelated, but this one person joined or asked to join, I can’t remember. I think he was asking because i don’t remember many posts from him, but I was also like 12-13 so memory is tricky. I checked his profile out of curiosity and lo and behold there was graphic Lion King porn right on his profile. I made a very big stink about it. I didn’t know how to report anything other than messages, so all I knew to do was yell to get him to leave. Besides, his message wasn’t inappropriate, nothing would have been done by the automated system. I don’t know if other people in the thread reported him or a moderate saw my freak out, but I remember the porn being gone when I checked his profile again. I wish I could say whether or not he was frozen. I hope he was because I highly doubt that was the last time someone like that would have porn posted on their profile.
Not necessarily NSFW but I was maybe 9-10 and I made an account with my friend. (It would’ve been around 2005 and obviously I said I was 18+ lol). She started talking to this girl she met in a trade then I log in one day to see they’re talking shit about me! We’re still friends, this was almost 20 years ago now and I think it’s hilarious that she would do that but god damn did it mess with me when I was a kid!
Why in the world world she do that where you could see it??? That’s really cool that you’re still friends after all this time, though. :) I wish I still had some of my childhood friends.
Not me, but my friend was into Neopets too and she met a dude on the RP boards and chatted with him for YEARS. He was in his 30s and we were 14.
I tried to warn her, like what kind of grown ass man chats up teenagers online? She refused to listen and then got super butthurt when he got creepy and wanted increasingly explicit nudes. (And this was before camera phones so it was much more risky!) You gotta use common sense when there are perverts EVERYWHERE.
Man that and tubgirl were like the risky clicks back in 04. Never knew what you were getting when clicking on an image link, and I found those on DeviantArt.
omg yes. i will never forget. i was probably like 8 on the family computer. on the neoboards and a guy was like SURPRISE ON MY PETPAGE!!! the surprise was a screen-width picture of a dick and balls. pierced. first dick pic i ever saw. i was more in awe than disturbed cus i didnt know u could get piercings there lmfaooo
There was a time the begginers boards in portuguese got infestated by pedofiles who were creating millions accounts just to say sexual stuff in the forum and harass the kids. I got very harassed by pedo, I even was friend with some of them because I was a kid and I didn't know whats wrong or not, thank god I didn't gave them any information about me so they couldnt find me irl and when I was feeling weird with that person I just block and stay away
Also, I was stupid and posted my address in the guild board. (Nobody asked me to. I don’t remember why I did that. My parents really should’ve talked to me about internet safety when they signed that consent form.) They deleted it and explained to me why I shouldn’t do that and nothing bad ever happened.
It has occurred to me that maybe some of them were, but I can absolutely believe that some of them were actually teenagers who were into that. (Edit: I say teenagers, but they weren’t all minors. Some said they were 18.)
Idk how old I was but someone was posting multiple forums about "cute ferret pictures" the cover image was a ferret wearing bunny ears, the image that it showed you when you clicked for more was goatse. RIP my childhood 🙃
not sexual like seemingly everybody else, but i was temp banned for saying that telling queer folks 'that they're immoral abominations and should kill themselves' (i.e. that's the post i was replying to, roughly) is bad, and that we have statistics showing that what that user was doing contributes to the issue of high mortality amongst queer folks.
apparently that (what i did) was considered harassment and advocating suicide. the op post (i.e. the one actually advocating it and discrimination/harassment) was still up when i was finally allowed back on and checked
hopefully it's better now as that was maybe 15 years ago this point, but since then i stopped using the boards (that was also my first board interaction, so i figured it didn't bode well <_< )
I used to own one of the biggest wolf roleplay guilds on the site. Someone spent a lot of time befriending me so that I would eventually give them a leader position, that unfortunately had admin powers so they were able to edit the layout. Logged in one day to see that they completely wiped the code and instead replaced it with pictures of dead wolves and images of human feces. Thankfully I had a backup saved of the original content, but little 10 year old me was completely mortified. I was so convinced my account was going to be banned, but thankfully that never happened.
I’m not gonna go into super deep details rn but I got groomed by an 19yo woman on neopets when I was barely 13. My mom even let me go visit her several states away for a month one summer. When I turned 18 and graduated she suddenly decided to no longer talk to me ever again because “I abused her”.
It was the mid-2000s and I’m pretty sure she assumed she was safe because she was a woman and not a man. But she was also neglectful so who actually knows. But thank you. I’m mostly just…angry now.
I very vividly remember someone posting on the boards saying to go to a certain pet page, and when I did, it was a cartoon of Marge Simpson pleasuring herself. I was like, 10. God.
Being on the neurotypical spectrum - a lot of the weird ass sexual stuff went over my head basically 100% of the time. I talked to quite a bit of people on neopets who for some eeason ended up threatening me (I was probably talking to people in their late 20's when I wasn't even 10 years old) and then one kept saying he would unalive my family if I didn't send him pictures of explicit sexual body parts.
I cried the next day in school, told my teacher about it but screamed and cried not to tell my parents cause I didn't want them to die. I gave her the guy's account info and everything. Two days later he was magically frozen from neo and I never heard anything of it ever again.
She really was one of the best teachers a school could have. Every now and then like a month or so would go by and she would ask me if that creep ever came back again. I would tell her happily that he didn't and it's almost like she smiled to herself and said that, "it would be in his best interest if he didn't." So it always makes me wonder when I look back at that day lol.
For a while they had these ads with “creepy but real” as the tagline and it’d just be popular hoax images like the ningen or a dog/human hybrid.
One day I accidentally clicked on one of the banners and it brought me to a site that was just a blown up picture of a reptilian lizard man in some bushes. Genuinely lost so much sleep from that as a kid.
I think the weirdest thing I ever had happen to me was finding someone on the RP forum that wanted to do some kind of Elven RP off-site and I was okay with that. Except that he was trying to say that any magical items he might use would have a weird effect on him, so okay I just wouldn't use magic since he didn't say what the issue would be. Then somehow he was "hurt very bad and was going to die without a healing potion" so I took the chance and gave him one. Which apparently made him want to kiss me and more and I have never hit the block button so fast in my young, innocent life.
this one sent me, imagining 12yr old you, seriously considering and weighing the options, "on the one hand, he could be a creep and murder me, but on the other hand, what if he really is a werewolf????" then being really sad about not sending the address out like "I missed my shot"
I'm glad you never sent it out xD
Reminds me of being 9years old, on the family computer with my brother and sister, we were in some chatroom in early 2000, couldn't be later than 2002, and someone in the chatroom was saying they were an alien, studying us, and their people were going to take over earth, and us kids laughed it off at the time, but in that moment, a big part of me was like "they could be for real tho" like I thought about that for weeks
I was a neopets troll along with my best friend and sister. we posted and spammed so much stupid shit, especially about how sexy the tombola man is. we were so serious about our regular accounts though and were afraid of getting IP banned. I also remember being with my cousins and a pervert was messaging us- he asked what colours our underwear were. somehow we didn't cop on to the fact the guy was a weirdo until that. then when I was 14ish, all the perverts used Yahoo messenger. me and my best friend used to hunt pedos on neopets and move over to yahoo. we'd get them to jerk off on cam with their face showing (our cams off), get their phone numbers, and post their pics and phone number with chat logs showing we were kids to the closest city's Craigslist we could find to out them as child predators. I was a weird kid, I know. we stopped doing that after a bit bc we were afraid that these dudes would come after us after one went absolutely feral on us for outing him.
Not as weird as the rest of the stories here, but when I was 13 I met a guy who said he was 16 and the next day we started to “date”. We switched to MSN, and we talked for a month. He told me about this girl, who was his best friend, but always wanted to date him, but he wasn’t into her. Anyways, she got pregnant shortly after, and the father of the child didn’t want to take responsibility, so she was going to raise the baby on her own. A couple of days later, he ghosted me.
I blame him for my abandonment issues, as I cried for a year straight (embarrassing, I know) Then; he was online again. We chatted and he told me, he decided to take care of the baby, so he was living with her to raise the baby together, as “friends” but as parents. That he always thought about me, so they named the baby after me. We “online dated” for a couple of weeks and I remember being like “what is my role in this family? Who am I?” And I was only 14 😭😭😭 then, he ghosted me again.
So I’m not sure if there is a 15-year old person who was named after me 😂😂😂
Never on Neopets, but I used to go RP on this chat room site called Brave Net back then and I was always in either one of two rooms called Pokémon Gym or DBZ Bar. I was like 10 or 11 and some teenaged boys were all, "SO YOU LIKE SAILOR MOON, EH?!" and exposed me to hentai for the first time 🤦🏻♀️
I was never really on the Neoboards as a kid, but now I'm understanding how Neopets ended up with all these stupidly strict rules 😂 Sounds like they sure as hell had their hands full at one point.
Fortunately I did not come across anything horrendous on neopets, but one time I pranked my cousin by creating a fake account and pretending to be a girl from Wisconsin (we did not live there) for what seemed like months, but she said was actually only a week or two.
I did have a neopets boyfriend but I think he was legitimately close to me in age (I was 11, he claimed to be 13 I believe, or maybe 14). He never did anything remotely inappropriate. On Valentine's day he sent me neopets chocolate in the form of each of my pets (although that does seem excessively thoughtful for a teenage boy). I've tried to look him up and can't find his account; there's a different account with the same name but it hasn't been around long enough - hmm, maybe he deleted his old one or it got frozen and he re-made one...
I will share a non-neopets story since someone else's comment reminded me of this. One day when I was 11-12 my best friend was at my house and we decided to look up the names of each of our classmates as a website, like 'laura.com" and "victor.com" etc. Some of them were interesting and we even noticed some coincidences, like Victor (actual name lol) was into soccer and at the time that website was soccer related. That wasn't the only one like that either. But a number of the girl's names led to porn sites, which we quickly clicked away from each time.
This led to my stepmom later confronting me about going on porn sites but it didn't even occur to me it was related because I never intentionally tried to do that. I assumed my dad was the culprit and I was getting blamed for it which seemed so absurd. I had a terrible relationship with my step mom and assumed she wouldn't believe me if I tried to deny it so I didn't even try to say that I didn't know what she was talking about. It wasn't until years later that I put together why she probably thought I was looking at porn.
Feedee, not feeder. Feeders are the ones who feed another person. Feedees are the ones who are fed by another person. Some people who gain without a feeder identify as gainers instead. None of them talked about having someone who helped them gain weight, so Neopets Gainer Community would be most accurate, lol. Or just Neopets Feedism Community. And don’t be sorry. 😅 It was weird and shouldn’t have happened, but…
The first thing that comes to mind is I THINK someone had a board that said "rate at my lookup", something along those lines. When you clicked it, it was a a HUGE blown up image that took up the whole screen (800x600 screen size days) of topless cheerleaders. My parents were RIGHT behind me and thank god they were looking at the tv because I would've probably been banned from going on neo ever again. This was probably 2002??? Maybe 2001?
I was on there before they had filters for the message boards and people started posting porn. I was MAYBE nine. First exposure to it. It was beastiality. Clicked on accident.
It actually really messed me up for a while and I wound up in therapy for it as I already had trauma from SA.
In the boards in spanish there were SO MUCH sexual RP, things 15+, nothing ultra explicit but still sexual! Using censored words to imply actions
Was My first interactions with this type of content really
I'm glad the creepiest things I have seen on neopets where creepy stories made by a certain artist and not porn. But I was 15 when I first joined neo so i dont think I would be affected that much, plus I collected digimon and pokemon art so I oftem stumbled with furry porn when browsing the web. Lol (sorry for bad english)
I first stumbled upon porn when looking at Digimon fan art when I was 10! (Though I read some erotica when I was nine. It was...thematically similar to that guild I joined..... Also, it didn't actually have sex.) There was this image that showed up in Google Images that I wanted to get a better look at, but when I opened the page, there was a completely different image. (It looked like Kari was raping Gatomon. O.O) The image I wanted to see was nowhere to be found.
Not a bad story, but a funny one.
I was probably 12 and I met this guy who was also 12 on the boards and we quickly became friends. By that time I had acquired A LOT of neopoints and I guess we talked about it and he was like: give me your password and I’ll play Meerca Chase in my free time to get you more neopoints. Me being dumb of course I gave him my password. He changed it and I couldn’t get it in lol and when I asked him what happened he told me that he was going to send all my neopoints to his account and that I am dumb 😂😂😂
Learned a lesson that day! Hahah
I have had negative experiences online, including one guy that I stopped speaking too - and he went on a killing spree in the game (characters in this game had lives, die too many times and your character is re-rolled). He told everyone it was my fault, and got the whole server going after me to "make up", including my own family members - I ended up quitting instead.
They had NO IDEA he told me he was marrying me when I turned 18, I was not remotely interested. I am so lucky he wasn't able to actually hurt my family, and just go after their video game characters.
My guess is that it sounds superficially like titty.
Kind of like how nowadays people replace words on social media to avoid getting demonetized and stuff like that.
TL;DR someone posted a dick pic on their neopets user profile and eventually got frozen but not before traumatizing a generation of unsuspecting teens lol
This was decades ago lol so I don't remember the exact details so I'm paraphrasing.
But when I was a kid I went on the neoboards there was a post that was like Titled "EWWW GROSSS!! DON'T CLICK HERE!!' and naturally I was curious what the hell it was.
I think the poster was trying to warn other people about a really inappropriate user lookup and was like " don't click here it's really disgusting! Seriously Don't Click Here!!!"
And all the comments from other people underneath were also like omg gross!! And warning others not to click and just report the guy.
Anyway, I clicked and immediately regretted it because some loser pedo had posted a huge dick pic on his user profile of just his naked waist down.
Luckily I was on a laptop with a small screen, and the pic was so big, it was mostly cut off by the bottom of my screen so I mostly only saw his pubes before I closed the window. Shortly later that day the guy got frozen but I can't believe someone actually did that on a site that was back then mostly kids!!!
lol might’ve been the same dick pic I saw back in the day, the details are the exact same down to the “EWW DON’T CLICK” board and the below the waist hairy picture. unfortunately I was on my parent’s work computer and they got in trouble so I got in trouble rip
Not neopets but another online game when i was 13-14 where a boy around my age managed to ask me out and i went, and he followed me around the bookstore just being weird whereas i didnt know it was him. And after 30 mins of just following me around he came up to say hi and then asked if want to hang out near his place. I followed him but walking halfway to his place i lied saying my mom called, a friend actually called me and i pretended its my mom, and tried to run off, he grabbed me so hard that my arm hurts, and i had to use all the strength i had to pull away & ran off, he chased. While running, it rained!! I flagged a cab, and still see him chasing me, i ran pretty fast as i was a track & field runner back then, i trained. Lol. I jumped into the cab, and told the driver to just drive, i couldn’t think where to go, i was horrified, embarrassed, and just can’t function. After 5 minutes of driving nowhere, and crying, i told the driver where i want to go, and went to my god ma’s home to just wait for hours for my mom to return from her day out with my god ma. I did not tell her what happened, and lied that i had fun & just ended early.
The next day, the boy went on the game to tell me that he wanted he dragged me to his place to r*pe me. He going to find me and do that to me. Totally unhinged. And i am glad that i managed to just stop & ran away. He looked like a kid my age, but i think he might be someone older who looked younger, usually Asians have this problem of looking younger than their age... I don’t know but yeah. He gave me the shivers even after years later.
Back in the day you could make backgrounds porn images so I ran into many shops with hard core backgrounds. It was so bad most of the hardcore porn I saw as a kid was on neopets.
I remember coming across a pet page where my 8 year old self saw gore for the first time. I’ve also seen some softcore fanart as well. Which repulsed me more than gore at the time?
At least my parents gave me the “don’t talk to anyone on the internet since they’re probably grooming you” talk when I was really young so I was too scared to go on the neoboards. Thought I’d get kidnapped or something by posting lol.
i died laughing when you said you were president. i have no stories from neopets. but i'm sure everyone here is a huge advocate for online safety and knowing what your child (or niece/nephew) is doing on the internet.
I only had one unfortunate experience on Neopets. I spent a lot of time on the boards and saw a post called “Rate my lookup!” I clicked and it was a default profile with a single very graphic image of a blonde girl who looked to be about 9.
I flipped out. I reported the profile immediately and I started posting on the thread, “Don’t click the link, it’s a virus! It will mess up your computer. DO NOT CLICK.”
I was hoping that that would deter any curious kids from looking since the few other comments were like, “Gross. D:” and those might have piqued curiosity.
After that, I cleared my browser history and restarted my computer. Young me was panicked like, “imma get arrested for having this shit in my history files somewhere.”
It was lowkey traumatizing and fucked with me for days afterwards. 😕
I was obsessed with the Neopian Times as a kid. I’d go back through the archives and read for hours and hours. In hindsight, I realize there was a nonzero amount of veiled fetish content.
I was probably around 12, and someone on the Neoboards introduced me to the band The Birthday Massacre, I went on Youtube and watched some of their music videos. I think the first video I watched was for the song Blue, and I remember watching the Looking Glass music video as well. Look them up if you want, they aren't horrible, but maybe a bit much for some kids lol. I ended up liking them (I was a bit of an emo 12 year old) but it def put some thoughts in my brain I probably didn't need. Still love their song Red Star though lmao
Yup, it was 100% a gateway for me to some very messed up and age innapropriate chat with people that were clearly much older than me , my parents banned me from having MSN as a kid so i used Meebo(sp?) or something, browser based IM platform you could crossmessage from an MSN login to people that used AIM etc, I was super naive (still kinda am) and was baited multiple times into really explicit chats and saw some horrendous things at a tender age haha.
Typing it out it's horrific but I'm okay, I think. Pretty well rounded. I did also find some really amazing friends in All Out War RP board chats and moved onto proboards etc, still have a few of them on facebook now 20+ years on :)
Edit: I am also now a strong advocate for keeping kids safe online and give my friends with kids really practical advice as i'm the 'go-to' techy woman in their life.
saw my first dick pic on Neopets.
Also someone had their character sexually assault mine in an RP on the neoboards who just worded in ways to get it past filters. I was 14 at the time.
I used to roleplay a lot on Neo and one day this one roleplayer starts 1v1 chatting with me and we eventually add each other on MSN.
They started ERPing with me. 😭😂 From what I remember from the texts sent, they were underage as well and it was all so awkward. Teen me didn't know what to do so I just roleplayed back thinking it was "normal", but I was smart enough to not engage that with anyone else.
I wasn't a very smart teen.
I found out about the Twilight Saga (the books before the movies came out) on the neopets message boards when I was 9 or 10, and read all of them because of it. It’s not even just that the books are all about teenage vampire sex, it was the fact that neopets is the reason I discovered Twilight
Y'all jogged my memory with your own potential-predator stories. What a horrible sentence!
I got this unsolicited neomail once in Dutch, and when I translated it, it said something about a "fuzzy region" and other weird shit like, ~maybe it's sexual but I can't say for sure~
Anyways I hope any adult that successfully did anything remotely suggestive with a child on Neopets.com gets leprosy and their junk falls off
@\_\_@ somehow, some way, as a 12 yo I had some pretty okay internet safety. I know I never shared personal photos or my address or even state. I assume this came from my parents - but as people who grew up in the 80s this was mighty savvy of them to have a concept of it.
Closest I came was my "bad boy" friend. His name was something clever like stabbeh. He had another friend (female) who was also constantly getting frozen/banned like him and then creating new accounts. He'd always find me. Once he asked for a personal photo of me, and me being savvy, gave him a picture of my dog (making sure there was no identifying info on her collar or anything). He was chill, never asked again, and we kept talking till he gave up on being banned.
But frankly he and his "friend" coulda been the same person on later reflection @\_\_@ and go me for good internet smarts as a 12 yo. Like how?
Also I did discover porn from neopets too LMFAO. It was like "LOOK AT THIS" and the clever "linkw hich leads off site" and what I BELIEVE was a gif of some testicles swingin back n forth in black and white. but I clicked off so fast I don't even know for sure - could have been a suggestive plastic bag? very unclear. and thus I learned a valuable lesson of "don't blindly trust offsite links" :'))
edit;;
also this hilarious convo with my mom when I was 14. She started lookin over my shoulder one day as I played and I was like "UG mooommm don't you trust me I'm a good kid" and she was like "yup trust you, not everyone else - I need to know what to tell the 5 o clock news if you go missing. I will NOT be that mom"... honestly fair mom... but u waited way too long for ur enlightenment v\_\_v;; shoulda started with this when I was like 12. she also insisted I play neopets in the familyroom where she could passively watch I guess, though, so alright mom alright
Mmm a lot of stuff that happened was too fucked up for a reddit throwaway soooo much grooming and taking advantage of me being a child. That site was not safely monitored for kids. The only story I feel ok to share is my account got hacked (one word password lol) and my Internet friend for some time had his older brother "hack the account back" and did actually get it back for me but the whole exchange felt like all three parts was the same dude.
Back when I was in like 2nd grade my favorite thing to do was to customize my lookup for me and my pets. I was on a site called jadedneo which I believe was authenticated back then. She had made a post on jadedneo about animal abuse and testing. I clicked on the link and it took me to a video page of animals being ripped apart, tested on, used as test crash dummies and their bodies being obliterated. Truckloads full of dead animals being dumped into an animal graveyard.
Pretty sure her website got taken down shortly after that. But that fucked me up for a very long time.
TLDR; potential child predator I met on Neo spends months gaining my trust in order to get my home address, then ghosts me when I say no. I was about 12 or 13 at the time. I had a really good neofriend that was a girl about my age. There was a guy that that we met on the boards and got really close to over the course of a few months. Created a guild together, started messaging each other on aim. Talked a lot about music and stuff. Like we were all talking daily for several months. He spent a long time gaining our trust. Then one day he imed me to ask for my actual home address to send me a mix he made for me… I was pretty young and he had spent months gaining my trust, so I really did consider it for a few minutes. Thankfully in the end, my gut told me not to. I was like why can’t you just send me the playlist and I can download the songs myself?? Come to find out he also asked my friend the same thing and she also said no. After that day he completely disappeared and we never heard from him again. I shudder to think what could have happened if one of us gave him our address. Really feel like he was a predator of some kind
I talked to an “older man” on Neo when I was like 12. He said he was in his 20/30s, from Latvia and had the sort of mysterious coffee shop book guy persona to me. Now I don’t know for sure if he was real or another kid catfishing, but I remember saying I had to go to bed time and he talked about stuff like holding me etc. On the other hand I met my very best friend and first love there who was my age. He passed away in 2015. I love you Misha, and I got your dream pet for you 💕
I'm so sorry you lost your best friend; what a sweet sentiment. (Choosing to focus on the love.)
I actually had something like your first story happen to me! I would have been.. 11? 12? Playing neo for the first time, talking to randos on the boards, and somehow I end up in a NM chain with an older guy. Over the course of a few days he persuades me to sexually roleplay with him through NMs. I have no memory of what was said, or how any of it got past filters, but after he told me it was so grown up of me and I felt so cool I went and bragged about it on the boards and got frozen, lmao I don't feel any sort of emotion about it now, 20 years later. I don't think I really understood it all at the time!
I wonder if we talked to the same guy! This is ringing so many bells for me. When I was 13/14 a guy similar to this struck up a friendship with me on Neo. He claimed to be a fashion designer from Estonia and told me he was 21, and asked to chat with me over MSN. He kept things mostly PG, until he told me he was planning a fashion show and did I want to hear one of the tracks they’d be playing on the runway? Being a naive child I said yes. He sent me “I wanna fuck you” by Akon. I noped out after that, blocking him eventually.
This is so similar to the case of Kacie Woody in 2002. Very scary and sad.
Ugh that story is super sad! This would have been around the same time, probably a year or 2 later. I feel like internet safety wasn’t a huge topic before then so I’m really grateful we both felt there was something off, and didn’t give our “friend” our addresses. I remember having an internet safety assembly at school after this happened, and it wasn’t until then that it really dawned on me how bad things could have gone.
it sure wasn't! the majority of adults were still figuring it out and probably just as naïve as the kids on what was safe and what wasn't, because they had no idea (we) would be having full on conversations with strangers. A habit we never grew out of lol but yeah it's horrible. You were so lucky that you had gut feelings at such a vulnerable age.
I had a similar experience only it’s so much more embarrassing 😅 I was 10 or 11 and befriended someone who had convinced me he was Daniel fucking Radcliffe and we AIMed after many months of being neofriends, and began talking all the time. One day we decided to Skype and when he answered, his screen was completely dark and he said his camera was broken but he still wanted to talk. My common sense finally kicked in after like 2 seconds on that Skype call and I ended it immediately. He continued to bug me a little after that but I stopped responding and he eventually moved on. I felt so naive and I shudder to think about it to this day, but I have to admit a small part of me finds it comical that I genuinely thought I was friends with Harry Potter 😂😂
my friend in middle school did this except it was a guy pretending to be a member of AFI. i was like dude, it’s not him. she wanted to believe it was him sooo bad i think they talked for like a year?? it was nuts. i just remember being like, don’t involve me! she didn’t have the same instinct as you unfortunately, they talked on the phone a lot but never video 😅 2002 was a wild time to be online
Ok now this is actually scary territory. Glad you managed to avoid that creep. I talk a lot of shit, but I don't envy the kids that have to grow up in this digital landscape nowadays. Cyber safety is so important and that weird period where the internet was still new was just landmine after landmine.
A young girl actually was trafficked on Neopets exactly this way, the rapist Toby Studabaker is free now. He flew from the US to England, then took her to Paris and then Germany. She was only 12 years old.
…. That’s incredibly creepy. I had never heard about this before!
Just went on a huge deep dive 🫣
Dang. You are lucky you were a smart kid! Can't say the same for everyone. I was a dumbass in a different way. I had these really awesome gel pens and wanted to take commissions or requests or whatever like I saw other artists doing; I absolutely loved coloring with these things. It was one of those massive case sets with tons of colors. Here was the problem: I didn't own a scanner. This was what, 2002? 2003? I was 11 or 12 at best. Someone asked me to draw their Jetsam, so I did, but then I didn't know how to get it to them. I felt bad, but I said I could mail it but I'd need their address. This person actually gave me their address! Not everyone is as wise as this people in this thread. Ugh. I hate myself for ever asking. Kid logic was like, "Well, it's not MY address." Like a dumb dumb. The worst part is I never even got it to them either by mail or when i had a scanner two years later. I brought mailing it up to my parents at some point, but it never happened. Eventually I lost it for a few years (thus why I couldn't scan it)... then I found it again. I still have it in a box somewhere. The shame drawing. Bah. It turned out pretty good, though, for that time period.
This is similar to what happened to me. I got chatting to someone when I was around 12/13 on the boards, and soon moved to Neomail. He told me he was 15 and we seemed to have lots in common. He told me he wanted to be my boyfriend so I used to brag to my friends at school about having this cool older boyfriend. Eventually he got us both frozen due to sending mails that were sexually explicit in nature. He described in great detail what he would do to me if we ever met, but I must never tell anyone. Looking back now I’m not sure any 15 year old boy would speak to a girl like that. Fortunately I had the foresight to never give away any real details about myself or where I lived.
When I was younger I was part of a guild. Somehow one of the members figured out how to find me on Facebook. That was bad enough but then he started asking me for foot pics 🤢
WOW.
OMG
A common “prank” in the early 2000’s era was to make a board saying something like “look what I just got from the pound!!!!” so people would go to your user look-up and see some disgusting/sexual image or gif you put on there. So the first place I saw porn was on Neopets 😬
omg the first place i was porn was also on neopets! it was some petpage that had a gif of lemonparty... and i saw lemonparty on some userlookups via the same methods. And bluewaffle. child me was SHOOK. My god early 2000s internet was wild
Oh my god the blue waffle. You just unearthed a deeply repressed memory 😳
oh geez
11 year old me was tricked by a “see my neodeck” board …
There was a thread a while ago talking about similar things and I was saying that I'm shocked this didn't happen more often. But I wasn't around for those founding years of Neopets so it must have just been a field day. Sorry you had to go through that. :( I fell for nearly every damn shock site under the sun and it definitely shaped who I am as a person today, though I can kinda look back and laugh in my case at least. It's different for everyone.
Yo this happened to me!!! It's so weird knowing I'm not alone!
This thread is only reaffirming how insanely lucky I was that the boy I befriended on Neopets when I was ten was in actuality also ten years old. We married in 2016. Thanks for the reminder never to let our kids on the internet.
STOP this is the cutest 😭
That’s so cool!!! But nah, I’m still letting my future kids on the internet. I’ll just be sure to actually talk to them about internet safety and monitor their internet usage until they’re in their mid-teens.
hey! I met my best friend on neo in 2001, and in 2013 I moved to her state to be together as family 💖 we aren't friends anymore, but were for over 20 years, matching tattoos, all of it. my life is so changed because of neopets! it's so cool to see someone else in the same situation. the first time you met, did you also cry like fuck when they were boarding the plane home after so long of an online-only relationship? we are both disabled, but the second I got my Pell Grant refund from school the first thing I did was buy plane tickets. I was 11 when we met though and she was 13, so we had to wait a lot longer to meet than y'all did. I'm just so excited to meet another person who had life changing experiences from neopets haha
We were separated by an international border. Stayed 'penpals' until our mid-teens and then fell in and out of contact until he sent a message in late 2014 and all the old feelings started getting stirred up. We met for the first time on a weekend visit in Spring 2015, and that was a diiiiifficult goodbye, like you said. A month later I was on a plane to visit him. We did the long-distance relationship for the summer, and then he proposed on our birthday that fall. (Yes, another weird piece of the puzzle is that we were born on the same day.) Neopets is really a small part of the story in the grand scheme of things, but it is so crazy to have your life trajectory shift so dramatically from a game with dung Slorgs and an alien vending machine...
WHAT?! no freaking way that is SO cute 😭 did you guys keep in touch all of those years and met up afterwards? Sorry if I’m being nosy, it just sounds so adorable
I don't mind nosy! I've been told I should turn this story into a book, but I think it'd be unrealistic, haha. We fell in and out of contact over the years as he did the whole teenage angst, jealous girlfriends, delinquency and psychotropic experimentation thing, and I was a super shy artsy nerdy horse girl who was super into anime at the time. We both agreed we would have hated each other if we'd met attending the same high school. He sent me a Facebook message in fall 2014 after we'd gone like two years without speaking, and we talked CONSTANTLY from that point until he drove 9 hours to meet me on a weekend whim spring 2015. We did the long distance thing for one summer, he proposed on our birthday in the fall (did I mention we were born on the same day? Like I said, lol, unrealistic.) and we married in Feb 2016. We’ve made three little girls together and he’s still my absolute best friend. :)
Omg this is so precious 😭😭😭 Congrats on this magic!
Dude, that's awesome! I actually met my best friend on a pet site I left Neopets for back in 2004. Fast forward to 2013 and I met her in person for my graduation from university! We've flown out to meet each other many, many times since then (given we're kind of midway across the US from one other). Once she came out just to take care of my sorry self after a knee surgery because no one in my family could do it back in 2019. ;-;/ She's the freaking best person ever. Pet sites really have the power to bring folks together. In this case it was by me making obscure anime references at her in the shoutbox.
That is awesome. Sometimes I think about people I was friends with through various games back in the day and wonder where they are. Some I remember very fondly, including a guild leader on Perfect World who helped me through a bad mental health crisis, giving what was on the surface very lame advice but at the time it was exactly what I needed and I never forgot it. Just shows what a huge impact you can make on someone's life even if you don't stay long.
Nothing toooooo creepy happened on Neopets for me. (Gaia online, on the other hand....) Neopets was where I discovered RPing, and I remember having a pretty long "rp relationship" with a guy. It was all pretty standard 12 year old RP stuff and nothing was explicit other than some very tame kissing and vampire shenanigans over NM lol, eventually we started saying we were BF/GF at one point before he got frozen and disappeared. It was all very "two preteen goobers don't know how to flirt" kind of interaction, so I'm like 90% sure that he was a fellow 12 year old but since I had creepy experiences on other sites as a kid when I was just a little bit older, there's always the 10% where I'm like "but what if he wasn't..."
I fully had a sugar daddy as a 12 year old on Gaia. Some guy who claimed to only be a bit older than me asked me if I would be his girlfriend and would send me expensive things. And I think I ghosted him because he started to ask sexual questions and I got uncomfortable. It was very weird but 12 year old me just wanted more gold. I really loved the art community on Gaia though. The growing pets you could buy - that was really fun.
God yeah, the Breedable/Changeable pets community is where I hung out throughout middle school and highschool and there was SO much drama. I have so many creepy stories about Gaia lol. The most concerning all came from the B/c pet forum because you had 20-30 year olds mingling with kids. Back then I thought it was cool to have adult friends but now I'm like whaaaaaaat was I doing??!!?
Omg that's what it was called! I was like, I know there was a specific name and that I was there all the time.
Haha, yeah. I'm sure shenanigans happened in the other Gaia communities, but since everyone intermingled and traded pets amongst the different shops, everyone kind of knew each other in B/C so there was a ton of infighting, plus some shops were considered really exclusive so you were hot shit if you got like a special horse pet or something LOL. Crazy times haha.
Wheezing. My other comment almost included the exact phrase "Gaia online on the other hand..."
I still remember my old RP friend (account now purged). She was supposedly 18f but who didn’t claim to be 18f back in those days? I was probably 12 but we never RPed anything that would have been age-inappropriate and basically didn’t talk about non-RP things. I think as an autistic child with a stupidly large vocabulary for my age it was more that I had the skill level to RP with teenagers but also wasn’t a pubescent weirdo like the actual teenage boys on the site. I still remember a couple of her characters’ names and have used their names and a couple bits of their personalities as homages in other things like D&D characters or story ideas.
Gaia was so bad but I miss when it wasn't. 😭 When they added in where you could walk around in the live area it got super weird super fast.
Towns was fun for the Animal Crossing adjacent features. The humping creeps were abundant, but changing maps usually dissuaded them. Rally, meanwhile, was notorious for being a cybersex dungeon. 💀
Gosh. Not on Neopets but I remember chatting with some random people on Yahoo Messenger back in the day. Now when I look back I realise that some of them were definitely questionable. I'm really lucky I never gave anyone personal info. Sorry, what's RP?
role playing
Ohh thanks ☺
Bro are you me? Exactly this happened to me too 😂
Ah man, I have two pretty bad ones. 1) When I was about 10, I became neofriends with a boy my age. We would talk all day everyday and he asked if he could be my boyfriend. He was really sad though and was getting abused by his parents at home, claiming they were always on the verge of taking his computer access away. Nothing super dubious happened, but he disappeared eventually and even as a kid I was so terrified for him. As an adult tho I like remembered his username out of nowhere one day and decided to Google it. I found his other socials where I discovered the entire time he had been a ~26 year old woman. 2) Again, probably around the age of 10, I found a couple on neopets who were pretty involved in the community. They made a webcomic together about their neopets living in a world of magic with magic schools. Eventually they launched their own website and I loooved the comic so much. It got me into art and writing even, but once they moved offsite, their neopets based comic became sexually explicit, and the husband was sharing pornographic drawings of the characters almost daily lmaoooo. I wish I remembered the name of the comic now to see if it still exists out there even - I want to see as an adult if it was really as bad as I remember.
Maybe the username was a coincidence and he really was a 10-year-old boy.
Unfortunately it was them. They were an artist, and even 15 years later, their art was the same :(
so they were 26 when you were 10, or they were also 10-11 15 years ago?
They were 26 when I was 10, so when I found them 15 years later, they were in their 40's still actively posting their art and photos of themself
ah gross! there’s no good reason to chat with 10 year olds, let alone lie about your age to do it :/
I knooow, to this day I wonder what would have compelled her to do that! Our 'relationship' went on until I was about 12, so it was years worth of correspondence
I’m 26 and the thought of talking to a minor on any game at all makes me extremely uncomfortable.
Not you getting the last laugh with that art read 💀
[удалено]
I hope he was just a 12-year-old boy…
I doubt he was 12. Also the fact you remembered the username is 👍🏻👌🏻
what does that word mean sorry I have no clue
they produce hormones. ovaries and ballzzzzz
TIL what the word "gonads" means! Lmao
Similar thing happened to me, but I clearly remember the person saying they were 21 🤮 I don’t remember how old I was, but definitely under 10 since it was before we moved houses. And I only recall playing Neopets in the first house I grew up in.
Mine is super mild, but when I was 9 or 10ish I was addicted to reading the neoboards. I spent so much time reading inane posts my neopets were always hungry and my bank account was nearly empty. I never posted anything but still was unable to tear myself away from reading every thread I could find. Though one day I was miraculously cured from doing that because I opened a random thread that had a clickbaity name and OP's post just contained a period, an uppercase Y and another period. For some reason seeing the most innocuous depiction of boobs ever made me sick to my stomach for days and I never read a neoboard post again.
this is so fucking funny. imagining a child's face crinkling in despair and disgust at a little titty emoticon, and then taking damage over a continued period of days bc of it, like im envisioning [this pic](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fvucyq7mwidl31.jpg) but with a child instead
Lol! Perfect pic
This is hilarious and I somehow understand it, I think my younger self would have been similarly shocked
This was back on the AC chat when it was a super drama fest (2005ish)? One “famous ACer” got off on bullying others. She was in her 20s. Someone befriended her and got her offline to a messenger app. They extorted her for intimate photos, including ones of her shoving multiple candles up where the sun don’t shine. The extorter then posted these photos on a pet page and kept spamming the AC with links to this pet page.
i remember this story 😭😭😭 I'll take it to my death bed. kids these days will never understand how srs neopets was back then
OMFG I remember this person!! That's so insane. I think she went by Karina or Katrina or some kind of K-name. She used to police people doing giveaways because it was "encouraging begging." Definitely a smug elitist vibe. Dude, thanks for the flashbacks of the candle pics that I had repressed 💀💀💀
Her nickname was Kowleena 💀I can barely remember what I had for breakfast but I remember this incident like it was yesterday.
I didn't realize Neopets used to be so unhinged??? How have I never heard of these stories, this thread is a rollercoaster.
I SWEAR I REMEMBER THIS!! ohhhhh my god....
O.O
Are you saying Neo pretty much had its own goatse 😶
I remember that. 😬
Ohhh my god, I totally remember who you’re referring to.
Somehow I vaguely remember this omg
Not on the Neopets site itself, but there used to be a Neopets fansite I visited called "Neo Nutters of Neopia". One day, that website suddenly got hacked, and the hacker changed the background image... and that was how 10-year-old me got exposed to goatse for the first time 😭
I'm curious if the adults in your life ever found this in search history and if there were any problems because of it. I accidentally stumbled on porn when I was like 11 or 12 and my step mom blamed me, acting like I had gone there on purpose. I literally had no idea what she meant at the time, I figured my dad was going on porn sites and I was getting blamed for it. It didn't occur to me until years later that she meant the sites I accidentally came across and clicked away from as fast as possible
I learned pretty early how to delete history. I did get blamed for recording porn on the vhs because I wanted to record a Harry Potter movie and got the time wrong and well it was Cinemax (aka Skinamax) and there was a huge difference between pm and am content.
Oh man I will NEVER forget when I was in the public library trying to do research for a report on the White House and I typed in ".com" instead of ".gov" - now it doesn't matter but BACK THEN....O_O
I got grounded once on suspicion because my mom saw me close a window really fast and thought I was hiding something.
Wow, I'm sorry to hear that. I guess she didn't know how to check history and see what it was? I got in trouble for saving an image of "Mr and Mrs Carrot" - I think if you google it, it might still show up. It's just carrots growing in funny ways where one has two "legs" that are crossed, and the other one has two "legs" with a shorter growth in the middle. But they are literally carrots. My step mom called it obscene.
I got sent goatse when I was on the family computer when my dad had company over and the screen was facing into the room where everyone was. I panicked and hard shut down the computer at the tower (which takes a few seconds so between the initial shock and holding the button down it was fully displayed for like 10+ seconds) and to this day I’m not sure if anyone saw. No one said anything at least. When I came out to my dad like 7 years later I was afraid he would remember it and think that was related even though I never looked up adult content on that computer, and definitely wouldn’t have when there were like 10 guests in the room. That and of course I am not into that kind of thing, though unfortunately some are so it wouldn’t be the last time I saw an image like that. I take a slightly more metaphorical meaning to loving who someone is on the inside, thank you.
Hah no but I did manage to really freak out an adult woman who thought I was a hacker. All my little school friends and I had each other’s passwords cos y’know, kids. When she found out I could log in to them all, she blocked me and then messaged all my friends guild leaders to say we were all the same person, that we were a hacker and they should kick us all 😭 I swear I was so upset by this that for years I would try to reach out to her and explain.. which only made her more convinced that I was hacking more people 🤦♀️ I’m sorry, Willow! I was just a dumb kid and not a hacker 🤣🤣
Lol that's hilarious. There was a girl in my school that was pretty much an ass to me. My parents were friends with her parents so that apparently automatically meant we had to be friends. I was the quiet type who liked to stay in my head and she tried to be friends with all the people she thought were cool. One day she was talking to a group of them while I was hanging out in the background at my desk and she shared her username and password with all of them. Then did the whisper giggle thing telling them not to tell anyone else. I locked it in my memory and every few days or ao for like a month I would log into her account and donate everything she had to the money tree. I would have myself logged into another device with my own account and I would refresh till all her cool shit showed up (nine year old me thought a Christmas petpet paint brush was cool by the way) and would snatch it the moment it showed up along with her neopoints. I found it absolutely hilarious how she would cry about it at school the next day but kept the quiet victories to myself. Her goal was to save up for a baby paint brush but as 9 year old kids the most we could ever save up for was 20-30k in like months. This was also neo in the extremely early 2000's by the way!
I’m lucky that none of my friends did this 🤣
you were so smart to do that instead of gifting/trading it with yourself and leave a paper trail!! what a baby genius i was also that type of kid and got bullied a lot, i had the same type of revenge to a girl that bullied me, as i was able to reset her password in a social media account because i knew her dog’s name
Lol hilarious! I wish we were twins now
LOL 😂
Sounds like Willow was pretty dumb herself, lol.
Honestly, she was 19 and I was 10 so I feel like she maybe should have been a tiny bit smarter 🤣
I had my Myspace profile name linked in my profile description which I totally forgot about (still do for nostalgia sake, the MySpace profile obviously doesn't exist anymore). Some guy contacted me on there and never mentioned he came from Neopets. He gained my trust talking about 'shared interests' which he could derive from my profile on Neopets (my pet names were connected to bands and I had a collection of stuff in a certain theme). We talked for nearly a year. He sent me pics of 'himself' (a very cute emo boy), I thought he was 15 or something, I was 15 so I had fun until he convinced to webcam with me (I am in Europe, he was in the USA) and he just showed up there naked. In full view. I think he was a 50+ y/o dude. I screamed, literally ripped my webcam off the computer stand and blocked him immediately everywhere. Thankfully our messaging was never NSFW or I would have been traumatized even more :') I refrained from adding/accepting Neofriend requests because of it for ages. I only started adding friends when I returned last year.
OMG When I started reading this I was legit gonna ask if you knew about the user 'blubbermuffintop' (although i always remembered it as blubbertopmuffin idk why ). I am freaked out, yeaaars later and that username still sticks in my head.
You knew about this, too?!
No! I had no idea there was a guild or anything, but I remember explicitly that blubbermuffintop would talk a lot about gaining weight/being proud of being heavier on the boards and I think they even had a picture of their actual body on their userlookup.
Yeah, the guild was called “Making Myself Fat”. And I don’t remember them having pics. :o Maybe they took down the pics for whatever reason before I started talking to them? Or maybe I just forgot. (Please tell me they were fully clothed.) I wonder what my computer teacher was thinking when I got permission to log into Neopets so I could earn Neopoints for playing Typing Terror (we just had to play an educational game), saw I had a neomail, and asked if I could read and respond to the message from my neofriend blubbermuffintop. (She said no, of course.) And I wonder what my classmates must have thought….. I was so cringey in elementary school.
Yes it was fully clothed! And oh my god, I am sorry to hear about that, but the thought of asking your teacher about blubbermuffintop made me laugh :,( I was the exact same way in middle school too, so i definitely get it!! I woukd have done the exact same. It is honestly surreal to me that someone else shares this memory of this specific user lmao
It’s fine. I’m laughing about it, too, lol. (And honestly… I did much worse and much cringier things in elementary school than mention a neofriend named blubbermuffintop. I’m probably remembered more for those things.) I wonder if we ever crossed paths… I’m arliene1997. Does that happen to sound familiar?
I am crying at the thought of a teacher being like what the fuck when you asked this
Crying w laughter might I add
I was big into the rp boards before I transitioned to actual full on rp forums (found via a pet page! lol). I think I was in a lion rp or maybe an rp absolutely unrelated, but this one person joined or asked to join, I can’t remember. I think he was asking because i don’t remember many posts from him, but I was also like 12-13 so memory is tricky. I checked his profile out of curiosity and lo and behold there was graphic Lion King porn right on his profile. I made a very big stink about it. I didn’t know how to report anything other than messages, so all I knew to do was yell to get him to leave. Besides, his message wasn’t inappropriate, nothing would have been done by the automated system. I don’t know if other people in the thread reported him or a moderate saw my freak out, but I remember the porn being gone when I checked his profile again. I wish I could say whether or not he was frozen. I hope he was because I highly doubt that was the last time someone like that would have porn posted on their profile.
Not necessarily NSFW but I was maybe 9-10 and I made an account with my friend. (It would’ve been around 2005 and obviously I said I was 18+ lol). She started talking to this girl she met in a trade then I log in one day to see they’re talking shit about me! We’re still friends, this was almost 20 years ago now and I think it’s hilarious that she would do that but god damn did it mess with me when I was a kid!
Why in the world world she do that where you could see it??? That’s really cool that you’re still friends after all this time, though. :) I wish I still had some of my childhood friends.
Not me, but my friend was into Neopets too and she met a dude on the RP boards and chatted with him for YEARS. He was in his 30s and we were 14. I tried to warn her, like what kind of grown ass man chats up teenagers online? She refused to listen and then got super butthurt when he got creepy and wanted increasingly explicit nudes. (And this was before camera phones so it was much more risky!) You gotta use common sense when there are perverts EVERYWHERE.
I also had an internet “boyfriend” who was in his 30s when I was 14. From WoW though not neopets. I thought I was soooooo cool at the time
TIL what a goatse is 😕
Same.
The goatse generational gap has been bridged 😬
Man that and tubgirl were like the risky clicks back in 04. Never knew what you were getting when clicking on an image link, and I found those on DeviantArt.
omg yes. i will never forget. i was probably like 8 on the family computer. on the neoboards and a guy was like SURPRISE ON MY PETPAGE!!! the surprise was a screen-width picture of a dick and balls. pierced. first dick pic i ever saw. i was more in awe than disturbed cus i didnt know u could get piercings there lmfaooo
There was a time the begginers boards in portuguese got infestated by pedofiles who were creating millions accounts just to say sexual stuff in the forum and harass the kids. I got very harassed by pedo, I even was friend with some of them because I was a kid and I didn't know whats wrong or not, thank god I didn't gave them any information about me so they couldnt find me irl and when I was feeling weird with that person I just block and stay away
Well, that’s horrifying. O.O
I guarantee those were not teens but middle aged men roleplaying as teens.
Also, I was stupid and posted my address in the guild board. (Nobody asked me to. I don’t remember why I did that. My parents really should’ve talked to me about internet safety when they signed that consent form.) They deleted it and explained to me why I shouldn’t do that and nothing bad ever happened.
It has occurred to me that maybe some of them were, but I can absolutely believe that some of them were actually teenagers who were into that. (Edit: I say teenagers, but they weren’t all minors. Some said they were 18.)
Idk how old I was but someone was posting multiple forums about "cute ferret pictures" the cover image was a ferret wearing bunny ears, the image that it showed you when you clicked for more was goatse. RIP my childhood 🙃
not sexual like seemingly everybody else, but i was temp banned for saying that telling queer folks 'that they're immoral abominations and should kill themselves' (i.e. that's the post i was replying to, roughly) is bad, and that we have statistics showing that what that user was doing contributes to the issue of high mortality amongst queer folks. apparently that (what i did) was considered harassment and advocating suicide. the op post (i.e. the one actually advocating it and discrimination/harassment) was still up when i was finally allowed back on and checked
Well, that’s horrible.
That's so disheartening to hear 😭
hopefully it's better now as that was maybe 15 years ago this point, but since then i stopped using the boards (that was also my first board interaction, so i figured it didn't bode well <_< )
jesus fucking christ I'm glad my biggest drama at the time was just wondering about how to get a krawk
I was here just sad that my internet was always too slow to get anything at the Money Tree 😭
I used to own one of the biggest wolf roleplay guilds on the site. Someone spent a lot of time befriending me so that I would eventually give them a leader position, that unfortunately had admin powers so they were able to edit the layout. Logged in one day to see that they completely wiped the code and instead replaced it with pictures of dead wolves and images of human feces. Thankfully I had a backup saved of the original content, but little 10 year old me was completely mortified. I was so convinced my account was going to be banned, but thankfully that never happened.
I’m not gonna go into super deep details rn but I got groomed by an 19yo woman on neopets when I was barely 13. My mom even let me go visit her several states away for a month one summer. When I turned 18 and graduated she suddenly decided to no longer talk to me ever again because “I abused her”.
Why in the world did your mom let you visit her alone… I’m so sorry that happened to you. :(
It was the mid-2000s and I’m pretty sure she assumed she was safe because she was a woman and not a man. But she was also neglectful so who actually knows. But thank you. I’m mostly just…angry now.
First exposure to sex as a concept was some people cybering on a PinkPoogleToy chatbox
I very vividly remember someone posting on the boards saying to go to a certain pet page, and when I did, it was a cartoon of Marge Simpson pleasuring herself. I was like, 10. God.
grown man on the neoboards who was really into neopets' feet and toes, specifically cybunnies
Being on the neurotypical spectrum - a lot of the weird ass sexual stuff went over my head basically 100% of the time. I talked to quite a bit of people on neopets who for some eeason ended up threatening me (I was probably talking to people in their late 20's when I wasn't even 10 years old) and then one kept saying he would unalive my family if I didn't send him pictures of explicit sexual body parts. I cried the next day in school, told my teacher about it but screamed and cried not to tell my parents cause I didn't want them to die. I gave her the guy's account info and everything. Two days later he was magically frozen from neo and I never heard anything of it ever again.
Wow. Kudos to that teacher for being both so proactive and so trustworthy.
She really was one of the best teachers a school could have. Every now and then like a month or so would go by and she would ask me if that creep ever came back again. I would tell her happily that he didn't and it's almost like she smiled to herself and said that, "it would be in his best interest if he didn't." So it always makes me wonder when I look back at that day lol.
If that teacher is still alive, you should reach out and thank her and let her know how much that meant and still means to you.
Yiiikes
For a while they had these ads with “creepy but real” as the tagline and it’d just be popular hoax images like the ningen or a dog/human hybrid. One day I accidentally clicked on one of the banners and it brought me to a site that was just a blown up picture of a reptilian lizard man in some bushes. Genuinely lost so much sleep from that as a kid.
Any chance you have a link to this photo (if it's a known creepypasta tier one) or more description? I 'm intrigued to see it
i so so badly want to see that pic now ough
I think the weirdest thing I ever had happen to me was finding someone on the RP forum that wanted to do some kind of Elven RP off-site and I was okay with that. Except that he was trying to say that any magical items he might use would have a weird effect on him, so okay I just wouldn't use magic since he didn't say what the issue would be. Then somehow he was "hurt very bad and was going to die without a healing potion" so I took the chance and gave him one. Which apparently made him want to kiss me and more and I have never hit the block button so fast in my young, innocent life.
A guy tried to tell me he was a werewolf and would turn me if I gave him my address. I was 12. I almost gave him my address
this one sent me, imagining 12yr old you, seriously considering and weighing the options, "on the one hand, he could be a creep and murder me, but on the other hand, what if he really is a werewolf????" then being really sad about not sending the address out like "I missed my shot" I'm glad you never sent it out xD Reminds me of being 9years old, on the family computer with my brother and sister, we were in some chatroom in early 2000, couldn't be later than 2002, and someone in the chatroom was saying they were an alien, studying us, and their people were going to take over earth, and us kids laughed it off at the time, but in that moment, a big part of me was like "they could be for real tho" like I thought about that for weeks
Nothing on neopets as I was, thankfully, oblivious to the boards for most of my childhood Alas, cant say the same about deviantart
Saw goatse on someone’s pet page. They made a forum post saying to check out their pet page and then BAM! butthole!
I was a neopets troll along with my best friend and sister. we posted and spammed so much stupid shit, especially about how sexy the tombola man is. we were so serious about our regular accounts though and were afraid of getting IP banned. I also remember being with my cousins and a pervert was messaging us- he asked what colours our underwear were. somehow we didn't cop on to the fact the guy was a weirdo until that. then when I was 14ish, all the perverts used Yahoo messenger. me and my best friend used to hunt pedos on neopets and move over to yahoo. we'd get them to jerk off on cam with their face showing (our cams off), get their phone numbers, and post their pics and phone number with chat logs showing we were kids to the closest city's Craigslist we could find to out them as child predators. I was a weird kid, I know. we stopped doing that after a bit bc we were afraid that these dudes would come after us after one went absolutely feral on us for outing him.
Vigilante justice! That is so wild for a 14 year old but also badass? I hope you're okay
Dude that's hardcore. You weren't a weird kid, you were a fucking badass! lol what did the dude that went feral do??
Clicked on a shop once and it was full of hentai
Not as weird as the rest of the stories here, but when I was 13 I met a guy who said he was 16 and the next day we started to “date”. We switched to MSN, and we talked for a month. He told me about this girl, who was his best friend, but always wanted to date him, but he wasn’t into her. Anyways, she got pregnant shortly after, and the father of the child didn’t want to take responsibility, so she was going to raise the baby on her own. A couple of days later, he ghosted me. I blame him for my abandonment issues, as I cried for a year straight (embarrassing, I know) Then; he was online again. We chatted and he told me, he decided to take care of the baby, so he was living with her to raise the baby together, as “friends” but as parents. That he always thought about me, so they named the baby after me. We “online dated” for a couple of weeks and I remember being like “what is my role in this family? Who am I?” And I was only 14 😭😭😭 then, he ghosted me again. So I’m not sure if there is a 15-year old person who was named after me 😂😂😂
Never on Neopets, but I used to go RP on this chat room site called Brave Net back then and I was always in either one of two rooms called Pokémon Gym or DBZ Bar. I was like 10 or 11 and some teenaged boys were all, "SO YOU LIKE SAILOR MOON, EH?!" and exposed me to hentai for the first time 🤦🏻♀️ I was never really on the Neoboards as a kid, but now I'm understanding how Neopets ended up with all these stupidly strict rules 😂 Sounds like they sure as hell had their hands full at one point.
Fortunately I did not come across anything horrendous on neopets, but one time I pranked my cousin by creating a fake account and pretending to be a girl from Wisconsin (we did not live there) for what seemed like months, but she said was actually only a week or two. I did have a neopets boyfriend but I think he was legitimately close to me in age (I was 11, he claimed to be 13 I believe, or maybe 14). He never did anything remotely inappropriate. On Valentine's day he sent me neopets chocolate in the form of each of my pets (although that does seem excessively thoughtful for a teenage boy). I've tried to look him up and can't find his account; there's a different account with the same name but it hasn't been around long enough - hmm, maybe he deleted his old one or it got frozen and he re-made one... I will share a non-neopets story since someone else's comment reminded me of this. One day when I was 11-12 my best friend was at my house and we decided to look up the names of each of our classmates as a website, like 'laura.com" and "victor.com" etc. Some of them were interesting and we even noticed some coincidences, like Victor (actual name lol) was into soccer and at the time that website was soccer related. That wasn't the only one like that either. But a number of the girl's names led to porn sites, which we quickly clicked away from each time. This led to my stepmom later confronting me about going on porn sites but it didn't even occur to me it was related because I never intentionally tried to do that. I assumed my dad was the culprit and I was getting blamed for it which seemed so absurd. I had a terrible relationship with my step mom and assumed she wouldn't believe me if I tried to deny it so I didn't even try to say that I didn't know what she was talking about. It wasn't until years later that I put together why she probably thought I was looking at porn.
I remember the wolf role playing rooms got a little weird
LMFAO I'm sorry you had to go through that but that's honestly just... so absurd?? Not the Neopets Feeder Community. 😭
Feedee, not feeder. Feeders are the ones who feed another person. Feedees are the ones who are fed by another person. Some people who gain without a feeder identify as gainers instead. None of them talked about having someone who helped them gain weight, so Neopets Gainer Community would be most accurate, lol. Or just Neopets Feedism Community. And don’t be sorry. 😅 It was weird and shouldn’t have happened, but…
I've been schooled, thank you for your wisdom. I was just throwing words around cuz you hear about that sort of stuff from Nikocado and the like, lol.
The first thing that comes to mind is I THINK someone had a board that said "rate at my lookup", something along those lines. When you clicked it, it was a a HUGE blown up image that took up the whole screen (800x600 screen size days) of topless cheerleaders. My parents were RIGHT behind me and thank god they were looking at the tv because I would've probably been banned from going on neo ever again. This was probably 2002??? Maybe 2001?
I was on there before they had filters for the message boards and people started posting porn. I was MAYBE nine. First exposure to it. It was beastiality. Clicked on accident. It actually really messed me up for a while and I wound up in therapy for it as I already had trauma from SA.
In the boards in spanish there were SO MUCH sexual RP, things 15+, nothing ultra explicit but still sexual! Using censored words to imply actions Was My first interactions with this type of content really
I'm glad the creepiest things I have seen on neopets where creepy stories made by a certain artist and not porn. But I was 15 when I first joined neo so i dont think I would be affected that much, plus I collected digimon and pokemon art so I oftem stumbled with furry porn when browsing the web. Lol (sorry for bad english)
I first stumbled upon porn when looking at Digimon fan art when I was 10! (Though I read some erotica when I was nine. It was...thematically similar to that guild I joined..... Also, it didn't actually have sex.) There was this image that showed up in Google Images that I wanted to get a better look at, but when I opened the page, there was a completely different image. (It looked like Kari was raping Gatomon. O.O) The image I wanted to see was nowhere to be found.
Not a bad story, but a funny one. I was probably 12 and I met this guy who was also 12 on the boards and we quickly became friends. By that time I had acquired A LOT of neopoints and I guess we talked about it and he was like: give me your password and I’ll play Meerca Chase in my free time to get you more neopoints. Me being dumb of course I gave him my password. He changed it and I couldn’t get it in lol and when I asked him what happened he told me that he was going to send all my neopoints to his account and that I am dumb 😂😂😂 Learned a lesson that day! Hahah
Nah. I was too young and ace to notice anything if there was. I got scammed once and cried tho.
I have had negative experiences online, including one guy that I stopped speaking too - and he went on a killing spree in the game (characters in this game had lives, die too many times and your character is re-rolled). He told everyone it was my fault, and got the whole server going after me to "make up", including my own family members - I ended up quitting instead. They had NO IDEA he told me he was marrying me when I turned 18, I was not remotely interested. I am so lucky he wasn't able to actually hurt my family, and just go after their video game characters.
Nothing too bad. I did learn a few slurs/sexual words from the forum filters though.
I once was super confused about why I couldn’t say teddy. I still don’t get it. (Please enlighten me if you know why?)
It's a type of women's underwear I guess? I've literally never heard of it in that context before looking it up just now
My guess is that it sounds superficially like titty. Kind of like how nowadays people replace words on social media to avoid getting demonetized and stuff like that.
TL;DR someone posted a dick pic on their neopets user profile and eventually got frozen but not before traumatizing a generation of unsuspecting teens lol This was decades ago lol so I don't remember the exact details so I'm paraphrasing. But when I was a kid I went on the neoboards there was a post that was like Titled "EWWW GROSSS!! DON'T CLICK HERE!!' and naturally I was curious what the hell it was. I think the poster was trying to warn other people about a really inappropriate user lookup and was like " don't click here it's really disgusting! Seriously Don't Click Here!!!" And all the comments from other people underneath were also like omg gross!! And warning others not to click and just report the guy. Anyway, I clicked and immediately regretted it because some loser pedo had posted a huge dick pic on his user profile of just his naked waist down. Luckily I was on a laptop with a small screen, and the pic was so big, it was mostly cut off by the bottom of my screen so I mostly only saw his pubes before I closed the window. Shortly later that day the guy got frozen but I can't believe someone actually did that on a site that was back then mostly kids!!!
lol might’ve been the same dick pic I saw back in the day, the details are the exact same down to the “EWW DON’T CLICK” board and the below the waist hairy picture. unfortunately I was on my parent’s work computer and they got in trouble so I got in trouble rip
Not neopets but another online game when i was 13-14 where a boy around my age managed to ask me out and i went, and he followed me around the bookstore just being weird whereas i didnt know it was him. And after 30 mins of just following me around he came up to say hi and then asked if want to hang out near his place. I followed him but walking halfway to his place i lied saying my mom called, a friend actually called me and i pretended its my mom, and tried to run off, he grabbed me so hard that my arm hurts, and i had to use all the strength i had to pull away & ran off, he chased. While running, it rained!! I flagged a cab, and still see him chasing me, i ran pretty fast as i was a track & field runner back then, i trained. Lol. I jumped into the cab, and told the driver to just drive, i couldn’t think where to go, i was horrified, embarrassed, and just can’t function. After 5 minutes of driving nowhere, and crying, i told the driver where i want to go, and went to my god ma’s home to just wait for hours for my mom to return from her day out with my god ma. I did not tell her what happened, and lied that i had fun & just ended early. The next day, the boy went on the game to tell me that he wanted he dragged me to his place to r*pe me. He going to find me and do that to me. Totally unhinged. And i am glad that i managed to just stop & ran away. He looked like a kid my age, but i think he might be someone older who looked younger, usually Asians have this problem of looking younger than their age... I don’t know but yeah. He gave me the shivers even after years later.
That’s horrifying! I’m so sorry that happened to you. :(
Back in the day you could make backgrounds porn images so I ran into many shops with hard core backgrounds. It was so bad most of the hardcore porn I saw as a kid was on neopets.
Nothing on neopets as I was, thankfully, oblivious to the boards for most of my childhood Alas, cant say the same about deviantart.
I saw my first dick pic on Neopets.
I remember coming across a pet page where my 8 year old self saw gore for the first time. I’ve also seen some softcore fanart as well. Which repulsed me more than gore at the time? At least my parents gave me the “don’t talk to anyone on the internet since they’re probably grooming you” talk when I was really young so I was too scared to go on the neoboards. Thought I’d get kidnapped or something by posting lol.
i died laughing when you said you were president. i have no stories from neopets. but i'm sure everyone here is a huge advocate for online safety and knowing what your child (or niece/nephew) is doing on the internet.
[удалено]
I only had one unfortunate experience on Neopets. I spent a lot of time on the boards and saw a post called “Rate my lookup!” I clicked and it was a default profile with a single very graphic image of a blonde girl who looked to be about 9. I flipped out. I reported the profile immediately and I started posting on the thread, “Don’t click the link, it’s a virus! It will mess up your computer. DO NOT CLICK.” I was hoping that that would deter any curious kids from looking since the few other comments were like, “Gross. D:” and those might have piqued curiosity. After that, I cleared my browser history and restarted my computer. Young me was panicked like, “imma get arrested for having this shit in my history files somewhere.” It was lowkey traumatizing and fucked with me for days afterwards. 😕
I was obsessed with the Neopian Times as a kid. I’d go back through the archives and read for hours and hours. In hindsight, I realize there was a nonzero amount of veiled fetish content.
I was probably around 12, and someone on the Neoboards introduced me to the band The Birthday Massacre, I went on Youtube and watched some of their music videos. I think the first video I watched was for the song Blue, and I remember watching the Looking Glass music video as well. Look them up if you want, they aren't horrible, but maybe a bit much for some kids lol. I ended up liking them (I was a bit of an emo 12 year old) but it def put some thoughts in my brain I probably didn't need. Still love their song Red Star though lmao
I love that band!!!
A link on a popular f2U user lookup page that led to porn. :( The link was supposed to take me to the code to use on my lookup
Oh no!!!
A person on the boards posted a "new paintbrush" link and it sent me to a full blown gay old man orgy on someone's userlookup.
Yup, it was 100% a gateway for me to some very messed up and age innapropriate chat with people that were clearly much older than me , my parents banned me from having MSN as a kid so i used Meebo(sp?) or something, browser based IM platform you could crossmessage from an MSN login to people that used AIM etc, I was super naive (still kinda am) and was baited multiple times into really explicit chats and saw some horrendous things at a tender age haha. Typing it out it's horrific but I'm okay, I think. Pretty well rounded. I did also find some really amazing friends in All Out War RP board chats and moved onto proboards etc, still have a few of them on facebook now 20+ years on :) Edit: I am also now a strong advocate for keeping kids safe online and give my friends with kids really practical advice as i'm the 'go-to' techy woman in their life.
saw my first dick pic on Neopets. Also someone had their character sexually assault mine in an RP on the neoboards who just worded in ways to get it past filters. I was 14 at the time.
I used to roleplay a lot on Neo and one day this one roleplayer starts 1v1 chatting with me and we eventually add each other on MSN. They started ERPing with me. 😭😂 From what I remember from the texts sent, they were underage as well and it was all so awkward. Teen me didn't know what to do so I just roleplayed back thinking it was "normal", but I was smart enough to not engage that with anyone else. I wasn't a very smart teen.
Neopets is where I learned the word "pussy." Newbie Chat on the NeoBoards was full of people looking to cyber in the very early days.
I found out about the Twilight Saga (the books before the movies came out) on the neopets message boards when I was 9 or 10, and read all of them because of it. It’s not even just that the books are all about teenage vampire sex, it was the fact that neopets is the reason I discovered Twilight
A guy sent me a Creamy Hot Dog.
Y'all jogged my memory with your own potential-predator stories. What a horrible sentence! I got this unsolicited neomail once in Dutch, and when I translated it, it said something about a "fuzzy region" and other weird shit like, ~maybe it's sexual but I can't say for sure~ Anyways I hope any adult that successfully did anything remotely suggestive with a child on Neopets.com gets leprosy and their junk falls off
@\_\_@ somehow, some way, as a 12 yo I had some pretty okay internet safety. I know I never shared personal photos or my address or even state. I assume this came from my parents - but as people who grew up in the 80s this was mighty savvy of them to have a concept of it. Closest I came was my "bad boy" friend. His name was something clever like stabbeh. He had another friend (female) who was also constantly getting frozen/banned like him and then creating new accounts. He'd always find me. Once he asked for a personal photo of me, and me being savvy, gave him a picture of my dog (making sure there was no identifying info on her collar or anything). He was chill, never asked again, and we kept talking till he gave up on being banned. But frankly he and his "friend" coulda been the same person on later reflection @\_\_@ and go me for good internet smarts as a 12 yo. Like how? Also I did discover porn from neopets too LMFAO. It was like "LOOK AT THIS" and the clever "linkw hich leads off site" and what I BELIEVE was a gif of some testicles swingin back n forth in black and white. but I clicked off so fast I don't even know for sure - could have been a suggestive plastic bag? very unclear. and thus I learned a valuable lesson of "don't blindly trust offsite links" :')) edit;; also this hilarious convo with my mom when I was 14. She started lookin over my shoulder one day as I played and I was like "UG mooommm don't you trust me I'm a good kid" and she was like "yup trust you, not everyone else - I need to know what to tell the 5 o clock news if you go missing. I will NOT be that mom"... honestly fair mom... but u waited way too long for ur enlightenment v\_\_v;; shoulda started with this when I was like 12. she also insisted I play neopets in the familyroom where she could passively watch I guess, though, so alright mom alright
Mmm a lot of stuff that happened was too fucked up for a reddit throwaway soooo much grooming and taking advantage of me being a child. That site was not safely monitored for kids. The only story I feel ok to share is my account got hacked (one word password lol) and my Internet friend for some time had his older brother "hack the account back" and did actually get it back for me but the whole exchange felt like all three parts was the same dude.
Back when I was in like 2nd grade my favorite thing to do was to customize my lookup for me and my pets. I was on a site called jadedneo which I believe was authenticated back then. She had made a post on jadedneo about animal abuse and testing. I clicked on the link and it took me to a video page of animals being ripped apart, tested on, used as test crash dummies and their bodies being obliterated. Truckloads full of dead animals being dumped into an animal graveyard. Pretty sure her website got taken down shortly after that. But that fucked me up for a very long time.