ok ok so i do want to do a quick rundown of why this is happening for the people who just logged on to neopets to witness the chaos tonight:

• in 2004, neopets was sold by its original owners to Viacom where the site was advertised pretty regularly on Nickelodeon’s 6-13 age block programming (as i understand it)
  
• This made a lot of people very angry and was widely regarded as a bad move. for the next 10 years complaints about the site’s slowly deteriorating quality would be attributed to Viacom’s ownership & users would long for the glory days of draik mps being 11 million neopoints (they are mercifully down to 350k as we speak)
  
• At any rate, in 2014 it was announced that Jumpstart (yes, that Jumpstart) was interested in neopets due to its largely older userbase. many people[1] praised the buyout, as they felt it would bring neopets out of the early 2000s, where it felt like the site had been stuck for a decade. Jumpstart has a decent foothold in the mobile app market, and neopets still didn’t have a mobile-specific site platform. Progress seemed on the horizon for our favorite site
  

[1] It should be noted that many users were worried that their favorite staff members would be leaving, but they were assured multiple times by these staff members that this would not be the case. More on that in a minute

September, 2014: Jumpstart begins the process of moving the site off of Viacom’s old servers and on to the new ones. The move is not smooth, lag plagues the site for the remainder of the week and the site goes down multiple times, finally having to be taken down entirely when users try to log in and are told en masse that their passwords are incorrect. other fun problems during 2014:

• shops no longer are able to sell items so users lower their prices to ridiculous lows to try and move stock that is literally frozen in place
  

• pets glitch so only one body part displays at a time
  

• KeyQuest (one of the most popular games on the site that uses real money to provide board pieces) is taken down for the move. I will quote the official facebook page here: “ …we plan to bring it back up within a week or so afterwards.” It is now 9 months later and KeyQuest still does not work
  
• userlookups go down and stay down for months
• the New Features page, the twice-weekly updated site news, gets downsized noticeably. items get announced with paragraphs of padding to make up for the lack of actual “new features” and what is released is glitched and doesn’t stock in shops or show up on site
• The site goes down for a few days in Oct to try to fix the lag problem, but nothing really changes and an expensive item is given to every user who logs in after Oct 3rd as compensation for the downtime, causing the price to deflate from 1.5 mil to 30k in less than 24 hours
  

January, 2015:

After a rocky (Jump)start, nothing new gets changed or fixed for some time. Site still lags incredibly and goes down often. A piece published in September starts gaining traction, noting that Jumpstart may not have had to pay a penny of actual money for the “dying” site.

March, 2015:

THE (real) NEO-PURGE - 

On March 6th, neopets users awoke to find that a vast majority of staff members had been fired from the neopets Team offices, leaving only a handful of mods to work the boards over the weekend. These were staff members known by name to the userbase and who regularly had contact with them. Many users feel betrayed, and rightly so. Jumpstart staff had largely turned a deaf ear to the complaints directed at them, and users felt their only line of communication that remained at Neopets had been cut off. The first neopets mobile app was released a week later to severely disappointing results. (seriously it’s terrible)

—-

Since March, a steady stream of former staff have been fired one by one, culminating in the removal of Droplet, the editor of the Neopian Times and known for her dedication and love for the site.

And so we come to June. Jumpstart overhauled the old filter system and decided that it was good enough to leave unattended (perhaps as a test for the upcoming long 4th of July weekend in the US)? I don’t know whether or not the moderating team was laid off or just given a reprieve, but the former seems likely given what’s been happening.

With no mods to ban offending users, the site has become a haven for shitposting and discussing taboo topics such as “homosexuality” and “politics” (both of which are explicitly forbidden as topics in the official rules)

This is personal speculation, but i believe that the mayhem occurring right now is the result of 9 months of pent-up anger at Jumpstart for their negligence of the site. Jumpstart has made this bed and they’re going to lie in it.