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Comment by zoba | Hacker News Reader

Neopets is the reason I’m a software engineer. Along the way looking for “cheat codes” for Neopets, I discovered some people hacking the games. I eventually ran a forum on hacking Neopets, made money from ads, got into PC World Magazine, and had a great time along the way.

Sorry to Adam and Donna for any headaches I caused during my teenage years. <3

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Similarly, Runescape private servers and bots got me interested in programming and computer science from an early age. Young me viewed Runescape as an immutable truth that couldn't be manipulated, but teenage me got involved in botting, hacking, and even the development of a Runescape private server that had it's own rules and code. It was magical to see that technology could be tinkered with. It introduced me to java and configuring tools, collaboration, and most of all how to spot a scam and the intricacies of a (granted, fake) economy. It's amazing what that addictive game gave to me.

Amazingly this summarizes my teenage years with Runescape.

Not only did I pick up botting and development of a private server, but I learn a lot about how virtual economies worked and how to maximize value buying small quantities and sell in bulk in Varrock.

It taught me so many things as well. One that comes to mind is after they introduced the Grand Exchange, “merch clans” became popular running pump and dump schemes on random items. Unsurprisingly the only people to actually get rich were the people who bought before the next item was announced, i.e. the insiders who actually decided the items. This has many parallels in the real world!

Neopets was where I first discovered hacking.

There was a user named "blueyoshi82" or something, I wanted to see if I could get into their account (I don't remember why). So I tried guessing their password, and lo and behold, it was just "yoshi"!

Being the white-hat that I was, I tried to PM them a message saying "hey you really need to change your password, it's too easy to guess", but the word "password" was blacklisted so I couldn't tell them.

I remember during school showing my Math teacher (who was a big Ultima gamer but also played Neopets) how I set up a fake neopets shop that prompted you for login. <form action="mailto:xxxxxx"> When you submitted the login form it sent the form inputs in an email to a hotmail address :D. One of my first experiences with HTML. I had no idea there were so many shared Neopets experiences in this community.

One of the first "real" programs I wrote was a thing in Visual Basic 6 that would navigate to the giving tree page and quickly snatch up stuff. It was extremely primitive, requiring me to manually sign in to Neopets through an IE webview, and most of my code was ripped from other projects on planetsourcecode.com(that site was epic to my 12 year old self), but somehow I made it work for a short while. Trust me, I didn't really understand what was going on or even what a GET request was.

Also, pushing the limits of the HTML and styling you could have on a store page helped me learn those things, and I'm sure some of the knowledge I use for my career in web development today came from those days on Neopets.

I wonder if I came across your site back then.

Ha, thanks for reminding me of Planet Source Code. I remember winning a Superior Code Award for a submission I made on there when I was a teenager and feeling incredibly proud. I even included it on my resume when applying for internships during college.

Yeah, I put a good pile of reverse engineering work into this thing at one point - used Flare and Flasm along with a lighttpd proxy to replace their swfs with my own.

ha I remember your site

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