Wed Apr 13, 2005 11:41 pm
I very much like them. I critisize the things that they do because I care about what goes on, but I think they have done lots of good and there wouldn't be neopets without them. Besides, I don't think I could ever hate a large group based on a few single actions, especially if I don't know who was specifically responsible.
Thu Apr 14, 2005 12:06 am
TNT freezes people who did not break the rules, puts unneeded advertisements up, puts numerous tracking cookies on your computer, puts up advertisements to spyware, ...
Thu Apr 14, 2005 5:21 am
The freezing is unfortunate, and I really think they should tone it down a bit. A few baddies going free is a good price for hundreds of innocents who go free. I believe all problems with the ads (and I believe the cookies as well) are the fault of a single person Doug Dohring. It's my impression that none of the staff like him very much at all.
Fri Apr 15, 2005 3:02 am
The freezing is unfortunate, and I really think they should tone it down a bit. A few baddies going free is a good price for hundreds of innocents who go free. I believe all problems with the ads (and I believe the cookies as well) are the fault of a single person Doug Dohring. It's my impression that none of the staff like him very much at all.
Doug Dohring and Adam Powell; Adam was the founder of a banner ad corporation before creating Neopets :-<
Fri Apr 15, 2005 3:22 am
Overall I think they do a great job. I have nothing but respect for the original neopets guys but the less said about their new dr sloth boss the better :/ There are some things that could and should be improved (less unfair freezings, better interaction) but at the end of the day it's a free site, it's had me playing for ages and I still enjoy it as do millions of others! That's not to be sniffed at 
Fri Apr 15, 2005 4:13 am
Antineopian wrote:The freezing is unfortunate, and I really think they should tone it down a bit. A few baddies going free is a good price for hundreds of innocents who go free. I believe all problems with the ads (and I believe the cookies as well) are the fault of a single person Doug Dohring. It's my impression that none of the staff like him very much at all.
Doug Dohring and Adam Powell; Adam was the founder of a banner ad corporation before creating Neopets :-<
Actually Adam has said that he's against all the ads. He worked with banner ads in the past and didn't like it.
Fri Apr 15, 2005 7:23 am
I like certain members of the staff but overall I distrust them. For starters there's Doug Dohring at the top but even putting that aside, in interviews they boast their 8 figure revenue and then claim that they need ads to keep the site free. Way back in 2001 they claimed that a revenue of 11 million US wouldn't be far off their revenue. The small ads I could live with and I even accepted the small sized banner ads in the old new layout but the large, unsightly banner ads at the top forced me to move to Firefox to get Adblock.
Then they brought out the bottom ads which made things even worse, they still haven't full removed them despite it being a "trial thing only" (The ads randomly appear, I had one of them yesterday at the bottom of my page even with adblock blocking a lot of their ad sponsors.
They completely ignore glitches that affect a lot of people and don't make mention of them in the news. I'm not expecting them to put everything right, especially if they have absolutely no way of doing so, but at least making a note in the news with something like "Earlier today there was a glitch that caused a lot of people to lose Neopoints from their shop till. Unfortunately we have no way of putting everybody's lost Neopoints back but we will check the coding for the till system to find the cause of the problem and try to make sure it never happens again. We apologise to everybody that lost anything during this glitch and we advise you to try withdrawing one neopoint to make sure it transfers through to your account properly before withdrawing larger quantities over the next few days"
The support crew in some cases give reasons like "We cannot unfreeze your account as it has been frozen for too long" to people that have been frozen for a year but in other cases will gladly unfreeze accounts that have been frozen for over 15 months
The editorial constantly promises things that never happen and carefully selects questions to answer that don't include things about issues that would cause users to get angry at people. They also lie about certain things. One such example is two weeks before the Faerie Paint Brush was retired, Donna gave her word that the people that are claiming the Faerie Paint Brush was going to retire soon were lying and trying to inflate the price and that the paint brush wouldn't be retiring any time soon.
The staff constantly add new rules to the site and expect people to know them off by heart as they don't update the rule pages often enough for people to be able to read them all at once.
The staff promise big new additions to the site such as the implementation of sidebar themes. It's now several months later and we have had 4 sidebars released, one was available for about an hour on one day, one was gained by about three people and one was only avaliable for one day by purchasing an expensive item. The other is available once a year on your birthday. They claim that each one would provide advantages and disadvantages but the only two that only do are the Birthday and Halloween ones.
I appreciate how hard the staff work and how great the site is considering it's free to play but I feel that sometimes people are afraid to voice what they really think under fear of almighty staff members seeing what they posted. The site doesn't value it's users which are the sole reason the site is still alive. Who cares if the users don't want ads everywhere ? We'll add them to make more money!!
The fact that a lot of people find the fansites for neo a better place to be than Neopets.com itself speaks for itself.
Neo inflates it's own numbers to make it appear better to potential advertising clients. Their user statistics fail to remove the amount of inactive, frozen or accounts that haven't logged in for well over a year. A glitch made the following section of coding appear on each page :
Ignoring the information about Hollypop (The user that posted the coding here) you'll see a little section :update pagestats2 set counter=counter+1000: which to my knowledge of coding causes each page that is viewed to add 1000 to their Page View Counter.
Basically whilst it's a good site, I just can't bring myself to trust the staff</rant>
Then they brought out the bottom ads which made things even worse, they still haven't full removed them despite it being a "trial thing only" (The ads randomly appear, I had one of them yesterday at the bottom of my page even with adblock blocking a lot of their ad sponsors.
They completely ignore glitches that affect a lot of people and don't make mention of them in the news. I'm not expecting them to put everything right, especially if they have absolutely no way of doing so, but at least making a note in the news with something like "Earlier today there was a glitch that caused a lot of people to lose Neopoints from their shop till. Unfortunately we have no way of putting everybody's lost Neopoints back but we will check the coding for the till system to find the cause of the problem and try to make sure it never happens again. We apologise to everybody that lost anything during this glitch and we advise you to try withdrawing one neopoint to make sure it transfers through to your account properly before withdrawing larger quantities over the next few days"
The support crew in some cases give reasons like "We cannot unfreeze your account as it has been frozen for too long" to people that have been frozen for a year but in other cases will gladly unfreeze accounts that have been frozen for over 15 months
The editorial constantly promises things that never happen and carefully selects questions to answer that don't include things about issues that would cause users to get angry at people. They also lie about certain things. One such example is two weeks before the Faerie Paint Brush was retired, Donna gave her word that the people that are claiming the Faerie Paint Brush was going to retire soon were lying and trying to inflate the price and that the paint brush wouldn't be retiring any time soon.
The staff constantly add new rules to the site and expect people to know them off by heart as they don't update the rule pages often enough for people to be able to read them all at once.
The staff promise big new additions to the site such as the implementation of sidebar themes. It's now several months later and we have had 4 sidebars released, one was available for about an hour on one day, one was gained by about three people and one was only avaliable for one day by purchasing an expensive item. The other is available once a year on your birthday. They claim that each one would provide advantages and disadvantages but the only two that only do are the Birthday and Halloween ones.
I appreciate how hard the staff work and how great the site is considering it's free to play but I feel that sometimes people are afraid to voice what they really think under fear of almighty staff members seeing what they posted. The site doesn't value it's users which are the sole reason the site is still alive. Who cares if the users don't want ads everywhere ? We'll add them to make more money!!
The fact that a lot of people find the fansites for neo a better place to be than Neopets.com itself speaks for itself.
Neo inflates it's own numbers to make it appear better to potential advertising clients. Their user statistics fail to remove the amount of inactive, frozen or accounts that haven't logged in for well over a year. A glitch made the following section of coding appear on each page :
- Code:
update pagestats2 set counter=counter+1000 where xdate=CURDATE() and lang='en' and country='GB' and gender='F' and agerange='19' and status='1'
insert into pagestats2 set counter=counter+1000, xdate=CURDATE(), lang='en', country='GB', gender='F', agerange='19', status='1'
Ignoring the information about Hollypop (The user that posted the coding here) you'll see a little section :update pagestats2 set counter=counter+1000: which to my knowledge of coding causes each page that is viewed to add 1000 to their Page View Counter.
Basically whilst it's a good site, I just can't bring myself to trust the staff</rant>
Fri Apr 15, 2005 1:31 pm
the_dog_god wrote:Neo inflates it's own numbers to make it appear better to potential advertising clients. Their user statistics fail to remove the amount of inactive, frozen or accounts that haven't logged in for well over a year. A glitch made the following section of coding appear on each page :
- Code:
update pagestats2 set counter=counter+1000 where xdate=CURDATE() and lang='en' and country='GB' and gender='F' and agerange='19' and status='1'
insert into pagestats2 set counter=counter+1000, xdate=CURDATE(), lang='en', country='GB', gender='F', agerange='19', status='1'
Ignoring the information about Hollypop (The user that posted the coding here) you'll see a little section :update pagestats2 set counter=counter+1000: which to my knowledge of coding causes each page that is viewed to add 1000 to their Page View Counter.
A piece of glitched code isn't proof of that, those numbers could have nothing to do with the counter itself and everything to do with how the numbers fit into an array or anything else really. Or it could be set to update every 1000 page views rather than every 1 pageview to be more accurate. It says nothing about page views, only page stats - that could be a whole different thing, for ad purposes or anything.
With the number of page views neo is likely to get anyway, I find it highly unlikely they would need to inflate their pageviews.
I think it is better to stick to what we know for sure rather than making such assumptions. After all there is plenty else to complain about
Fri Apr 15, 2005 8:09 pm
Trick wrote:the_dog_god wrote:Neo inflates it's own numbers to make it appear better to potential advertising clients. Their user statistics fail to remove the amount of inactive, frozen or accounts that haven't logged in for well over a year. A glitch made the following section of coding appear on each page :
- Code:
update pagestats2 set counter=counter+1000 where xdate=CURDATE() and lang='en' and country='GB' and gender='F' and agerange='19' and status='1'
insert into pagestats2 set counter=counter+1000, xdate=CURDATE(), lang='en', country='GB', gender='F', agerange='19', status='1'
Ignoring the information about Hollypop (The user that posted the coding here) you'll see a little section :update pagestats2 set counter=counter+1000: which to my knowledge of coding causes each page that is viewed to add 1000 to their Page View Counter.
A piece of glitched code isn't proof of that, those numbers could have nothing to do with the counter itself and everything to do with how the numbers fit into an array or anything else really. Or it could be set to update every 1000 page views rather than every 1 pageview to be more accurate. It says nothing about page views, only page stats - that could be a whole different thing, for ad purposes or anything.
With the number of page views neo is likely to get anyway, I find it highly unlikely they would need to inflate their pageviews.
I think it is better to stick to what we know for sure rather than making such assumptions. After all there is plenty else to complain about
Well put, Trick. The_dog_god, you have no proof that they are inflating their pageviews. Until you have real evidence, don't make accusations.
(Oh, and in case anyone was wondering: I think TNT has their issues, but I like them! You can't blame the entire staff for something that may be caused by one person, or nobody's fault at all. I think there are a lot of cool people on staff and overall they do a great job with the site.)
Sat Apr 16, 2005 9:19 pm
I worry that the staff that everyone knows and loves has lost the power to make substantial changes. I am upset that after a year of work , I reach a million neopoints (quite legally) and then get frozen ...TWICE. I am curious on the system used to judge contests (is it TOTALLY random?) but mostly I am optomistic when I see feedback on PPT making good but small changes on neopets.
Sun Apr 17, 2005 1:27 am
Well, a few of them are good, like Adam, Donna, snarkie etc, but Neopets really need better staff who know the site culture and the proper rules, instead of freezing randomly. Heck, I think they train their staff by saying, "Here, Steve, this is Neopets, basically you go on these neoboards here and freeze whoever who does or says something wrong. If you freeze enough people you get promoted to the games department. Good luck."
Their staff system is also bad, and different staff may give different information to players, thus misleading them on what is accepted and what is not. Support also takes too long.
On the whole, I think I'm leaning more towards the negative side.
Their staff system is also bad, and different staff may give different information to players, thus misleading them on what is accepted and what is not. Support also takes too long.
On the whole, I think I'm leaning more towards the negative side.