Neopets Site-Wide Blocks and Captchas

[Daviid]

We're a cheating community that's publicly discussing the latest countermeasures that Neopets has put in place to derail our cheating solutions. They're watching us, and they'll be waiting for us to retaliate so that they can try something else on us. Perhaps not talking about what we know would disarm the situation a bit? I don't get why you're so eager to argue this point, Daviid. I for one am in no hurry to engage the Neopets team in an arms race of counter-coding. Deescalation means keeping quiet about what we know so that they stop trying to fight back against us when we work around it.

It'll take literally 2 minutes for any programmer at Neo to download any of our programs and check what they do, if this "arms race of counter-coding" hasn't happened yet is because Nickelodeon didn't give a fuck about it, they just wanted to make money with NC and tolerated a little cheating.

Jumpstart is stepping up their game, as I said this is not to stop cheaters but to stop hackers scanning for unchanged passwords from the leak. We're just bystanders hit by a stray bullet.

Keeping quiet about what we know? What do we know? That they're using Stackpath's CDN, they could be using Cloudflare just the same. Do you see people conspiring to bypass cloudflare? No, it's all publicly available. Just deobfuscate the javascript they inject and emulate it.

This isn't a game changer, this is old, bots where always supposed to emulate a real person browsing the web, it's just that we could be lazy because TNT didn't have any way to check for that and what little they used to check for/stop bots was bypassed easily and publicly (e.g dark pixel in shop captchas or inserting an hidden image that makes a request to a specific URL, this last one coders didn't even bother to emulate, so you can see how little TNT cared).

Technology evolves and now they have solutions readily available to try and stop botters, so every user here should know before they use a program all willy-nilly.

[Arnie]

Aw. Not again.
I lost some dear accounts I've built legally (except for the multi account part) the last time they did that :s

[Flordibel]

I just don't understand why they are breaking their website with these changes. Extremely unprofessional, especially when they could be testing these changes on a test/development server before going live. These are standard practices.

At the same time, most of our programmers are still here so updates can be made. No one knows if this is entirely to track potential cheaters, which is not a great method to be using.

On the bright side, clraik is getting more traffic because the main game is messy at the moment.

What, you don't test your code in PRD? /s



Memes aside, thanks for the heads-up y'all. Much appreciated.

[♥ PrettySarcastic ♥]

The absolute lack of professional communication and support on Neopets should be embarassing to them, especially considering how much they rely on constant revenue streams from users pouring money into their NC Mall, not even going into premium.

It would take 5 minutes to compose a statement about server transitioning and what it would impact and an estimated timeline for stability, but apparently their paying userbase hasn't even earned that.

Forget testing this stuff on the back end before dumping it into the wild like Joe suggested.

Tremendously infuriating. I genuinely appreciate all the updates and additional info the minds here have put forth, though, and I'm sure in the end we'll make the best of it.

<3

[I_royalty_I]

Time to wait and see if there�s some fun lag to churn out some dupes lol

[Koto]

Thanks so much for keeping us all posted! Personally doing recommended best practice from our programmers and disable the few daily bots I have going until we know what's what.

Echoing the frustration around the total lack of transparency on legitimate channels and general fuckery with live production testing.

[Goddammit]

You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to Odd again

Thanks for being the best, Odd.

[SmileYaDead]

Nowhere in my post do I say how to bypass their security.

If they are implementing this is because someone has been mass scanning the DB leak for old functioning passwords.

Didn't several people do that years ago? I can guess a few names just by lurking. And by years I mean like 2-3 years back.

[Daviid]

Didn't several people do that years ago? I can guess a few names just by lurking. And by years I mean like 2-3 years back.

I'm sure, but apparently they knew what they were doing.
There must be some newbie scanning nonstop so it pissed TNT off.

[kiara]

This is so annoying, scripts and bots have made playing Neopets better for me.