This weekend, the Neopets forums got very active. Perhaps, the most active in a long time.
7:22pm - Update: Neopets PR team have issued statements to Kotaku (see below).
Neopets is a virtual pet web game. Kids play it. It’s probably the least vulgar thing you can imagine. But, if you’ve ventured into ventured into the Neopets forums over the past 24 hours, you’d see thread titles like “how big is yr dick,” “any1 in2 pegging here,” and “about to start masturbating.”
And so on:
It’s still unclear what’s happened over the weekend, whether there were no filters or not enough filters or mods or something, but Kotaku has reached out to Knowledge Adventure, who bought Neopets last year from Viacom, to find out what’s up.
What is clear is that the Neopets forums turned into a hot mess. Below you can see some more images floating around online:
The Team Message Board currently has no topics, so it looks like it has been locked down.
But, there are still the odd thread topic here and there—the forums hardly seem totally under control. This explains why on some boards, you see threads like, “i need help fucking myself,” “How come my rooster gets big when i see girls,” and “clitoris.”
One exasperated forum user might have put it best: “I leave for 6 years and come back to this cesspit?” Welcome back, I guess.
Update: A spokesperson for Neopets issued the following statement to Kotaku:
At some point over the weekend, as a result of a facility move, the Neopets moderation and filter system went off line. During this period, our moderation team was not able to access and appropriately manage the Neopets community and inappropriate comments that were being made. Jumpstart has since taken down the boards and other areas affected as we work to get the moderation teams and filters functioning properly. This was an unfortunate incident due to a facility move related to our servers and not the result of any changes to our moderation teams and we apologize to the users that were affected. We will keep all users updated during the day.
This was not a staffing issue, but a technology issue related to a move in facilities and our servers that control our moderation. Rest assured that we are taking this seriously and putting fail safe solutions in for the future.
Quick update, we have since writing this, reconnected all servers associated with moderation/filtering on Neopets.
Another spokesperson added, “We just want to be clear that no mods were fired, and the issue was in no way related to staffing—rather, it was due to a move in facilities.”
Lead image: Luke Plunkett
To contact the author of this post, write to bashcraftATkotaku.com or find him on Twitter@Brian_Ashcraft.