My earliest computer memories (after Putt-Putt and Spy Fox) were all formed on Neopets. I'm not sure what exactly made Neopets so exciting for me since there's not a chance I was old enough to appreciate how revolutionary it was, as I started playing when I was around 7. But it kept me hooked for many years, and I still log in to my original account from time to time.
I loved the games room even though I was too terrible to win trophies or make many neopoints. I was actually quite excited by the dress up features and the Neocash mall when it was new. I still mourn the end of KeyQuest and Habitarium but maybe the world just wasn't ready. I spent maybe a little too much time watching Neopets YouTube Neovision videos over and over again. But my most favorite section of Neopets? More than anything else? The Neoboards.
I was a huge fan of the roleplay section in particular. I did a lot of "gifted boarding school" RP, which was like superhero high school or something, as it was the popular genre at the time. At any given time, there would be no less than 10 active roleplay threads listed as that exactly. Neopets roleplay is special because due to the short-lived, fast-moving pace of the forum, and the low character limits of posts, I don't think not one roleplay session made it past basic character introductions. But it didn't matter because I kind of treated it like playing with dolls.
Character profiles were all hosted on petpages, and this was my introduction to HTML and CSS. You'd spend a little time finding a premade layout and changing it a little to suit your character(s) and then dig through Photobucket and DeviantArt and borrow pictures of whatever edgy anime characters you liked. I suppose some people used photos of the popular emo/scene models(?) at the time. And you might pick other images to show the different outfits and hairstyles you'd like people to imagine your stolen artwork original character wearing. I'd sometimes use the Candybar pixel dollmaker to make characters too. None of my OC pages remain, but I believe I was quite fond of cat ears and big angel wings. But I'm grateful to the gifted boarding school roleplayers for instilling in me an interest in big words and moodboarding at a young age. I still hope some day to find some talent for writing!
I went through a rebellious phase too, where I openly antagonzied people with no motivation other than that I was 12 and it was fun. I was quickly told off and learned to keep my comments to myself in a Word doc along with screenshots. Luckily my sickest burns and cleverist quips are still intact.
While I was local to the roleplaying board, I toured some of the other topics too. Mostly site events, Newbieland, and whatever one was the unofficial one for older users. Having learned my lesson, I did not antagonize people on these boards and mostly lurked. I'm not entirely sure why I took these screenshots as I had no one to share them with, but perhaps I was inspired by other snarky petpages. Neopets was actually the first dramagossip site.
Search for Tarla is the only site event that I really really remember, and I think part of it was that on the Neoboards people kept getting banned for making 4/20 jokes in reference to the mist. I believe this event was largely hated due to how frustrating it could be. Some people expressed this frustration in very interesting ways.
My childhood dream of finishing the Secret Lab Map was finally achieved in 2021 and with Neopets in the current state it's in, I don't have any actual goals for anything else. I've considered trying the newer fanmade iterations of Neopets but I know that they have their own interpretations of how Neopets "should have been" and they certainly won't match mine. Because in my opinion the biggest mistake Neopets ever made was never putting usuki into production for merchandising despite having no problems selling plush and toys.