Last week you had a bit about harrasment and I am still left confused about harrasment in regards to screenies. My Question is. Is it harrasment to have somebodys name in a screenie if they do not want it there and have asked you not to. I have asked around the boards and have gotten many varying answers so I was wondering if you could clear that up once and for all. ~ jade_stone_dragon
Yes. For example, if someone insults you on a "screenie" page and they do not remove your username and/or any other distinguishable features in the screenshot when you ask them to, that is harassment.

We can spend every editorial going over anything that gets submitted for clarification, but we still wouldn't be able cover every possible situation. :) In the end, it's best to just use your common sense. If you *really* feel harassed or threatened, report it. Otherwise, it's best to just take a step back and ignore the people who go a little overboard for no apparent reason. ;)

Is there a way to get stamps out of your album? I wish I knew =) ~ snorkl3
Short answer: No.
Long answer: Well, I guess it's still no.
Once you put them in, they're stuck there for all eternity. Possibly longer.

"Hmmm... what else can I do to make my stamps worth MILLIONS?! *grin*"

If you have a high score and get a trophy, and then someone else gets a higher score than you, do you get to keep the trophy? ~ uniowner53802
After the trophy has been awarded to your account, yes. :) Once it's on your lookup, you keep it forever.

However, if you appear on the high score table and are bumped off before the end of the day when the trophies are awarded, you will not receive a trophy.

My friend said that there are magic plushies, which turn your pet into whatever kind of pet the plushie is. Is this true, or is this just a rumor? ~ franticwhitedragon
Yes, it's true. There are magical plushies that can turn any Neopet who plays with them into whatever species/colour the plushie is. These plushies are ALWAYS called "Magical ____ Plushie" so do NOT let anyone trick you into buying a non-magical one saying it will change your Neopet.

Help! My sister and I used the same email address to make our accounts, and we use the same computer to play on them. My mum uses this computer, too. My sister and I don't want our accounts to get frozen because of the same email address thing! *cries hysterically* What do you suggest o wise one?! ~ stormcloud_lightning
Don't worry! You can change your email address by going to preferences via the help link, then selecting email preferences. If both of you are under 13 with no parental permission, you can change it once one of you turns 13.

My Mutant Aisha looks sad on my lookup, and it says that its miserable. I put it in the NeoLodge, gave it a petpet, play with it and everything, but it is still sad. But I don't want my lovely Mutant to turn blue! Why is it still so sad, after all my efforts? ~ stormcloud_lightning
You again! How'd you get here twice!?

In any case, some Neopets need quite a bit of attention to become happy again. Make sure they are free from any sicknesses, then take them for a ride on the Merry Go Round on Roo Island, or on a Tiki Tour of Mystery Island. You may have to try several different things several different times to get her in a good mood again. :)

Is it cheating to post the answers to puzzles all over the various message boards? I see many people posting the Lenny conundrum answers everywhere. This defeats the purpose and the fun as well as the pride in figuring it out yourself. ~ boolasgurl
Agreed! Not only that, posting the answers reduces the rewards for everyone who enters. Not cool. Anyway, we don't mind people working together to solve things. That's part of the fun as well. :) But if someone tells all their friends the answer, or posts it on the message boards for all to see, they will not like what happens to their accounts come judging time.

"This wand isn't just for show, buddy!"

Please could you put the Shop Blogs into some kind of order! There are soo many of them now and I want to be able to find the one I want quickly without having to look at all 17 pages of them. ~ xepirada
Yeah, it is quite annoying. >.< Basically, we are planning a rewrite for most of the things you can find in the Stuff section so that they're much easier to navigate through. Though, to be truthful, this isn't a big priority right now. With plots and holidays and Advent and some other big projects in the works, it will be a while before we can get to it!

Hi. I recently tried to enter my gallery into the gallery spotlight and it said this: "Oops! Something weird happened and your spotlight wasn't entered into our database. Sorry about that. Please go back and try again!" I tried it again and got the same message. I have now been trying for MONTHS and still get the same message. I’ve submitted to the editorial and to bug reports and nobody has answered me and nothing was fixed. I still get the same error message. Please fix this. I've been working on my gallery for a really long time (as long as I had this account which would be a year and four months) and would like to have the chance of entering it into the gallery spotlight. I can't move all the items to another account and submit for the gallery spotlight there because I spent a fortune upgrading my gallery on this account. I’d really appreciate it if you could help fix my problem! Thank you. ~ yummycakegallery
You're in luck! We just had the Gallery patron look at it and it appears your gallery name, with its funny characters and all, was breaking the submission form. It should work now though, so enter away. :)

(However, you may want to check the blog at the top of your gallery in Firefox before you submit! The judges will dock you for not being compatible.)

See, I've been training his strength and he's level 40, and then yesterday I did a dark faerie quest and his hit points got raised to 82. Now, if I raise his level to 41 to keep training him, it will cost me 3 codestones instead of two. So, how can I lower his hit points so I can keep training his strength for 2 codestones? ~ aku67290
If you have access to the Secret Laboratory you can zap your Neopet and hope his strength drops (though it very well could go up even more). If not, there isn't much you can do we're afraid :( You'll have to pony up the extra codestone. What does the Techo Master do with all those codestones, anyway?

When the clocks go back (or forwards) in real time, for Daylight Savings Time, do they also go back in Neopia? ~ popuri__
Yes. Neopia runs on Pacific Standard Time due to the location of Neopets headquarters, and is affected by Daylight Savings.

If you have a series published in the neopian times, does each part count towards the avatar? ~ *anonymous*
Anonymous! Curses.

Our Neopian Times editor saaaaaaaaaaaays... YES! *hurray!* Each part credits you with a trophy, which is one step closer to the avatar. :D

A few of my friends who are not able to get on Neopets every day have asked me to get on their accounts and get their advent calendar prizes for them. I've been doing it, but I'm terrified that I'll get myself, and all my friends, frozen for "having multiple accounts". Can you assure me that you have a way to know that I'm not on multiple accounts? ~ [removed]
Whoa whoa. Yeah, stop now. PUT THE MOUSE DOWN!

You CANNOT log into another user's account to play Neopets for them, and getting someone their dailies (including Advent) is indeed playing the site. It's not the multiple account thing you have to worry about... you're all cheating and that's definitely not allowed. They're cheating by asking you to play for them and giving you their account information, and you're cheating by playing the site for someone else. Tell your friends to stop being slackers and get their own freebies, and for Fyora's sake, stay out of their accounts so you don't get frozen.

Some people say that you can get frozen from refreshing to much. For example some avatars people say you can only get from refreshing and they say that you can get frozen from refreshing to much. Is that true? ~ x_tammeh
Just like many things in Neopets and life, there is a line. Let's clarify.

- Hitting refresh repeatedly for a few minutes, allowing the page to load. – Great

- Holding down F5 for 10-30 seconds at a time, checking for the avatar/challenger, then trying again if it has not been achieved – Still good.

- Holding down the F5 key for 20 minutes – Okay, but try to take a break for your mental sake and ours.

- Leaving your "cat" on the F5 key while you make a sandwich. – Not good.

- Leaving your "cat" on the F5 key all night while you sleep – Bad.

- Using a program that refreshes for you at the same rate as a human – Frozen!

- Using Opera to open 100+ pages and hitting "refresh all" – VERY frozen.

Ummm...I was just wondering...why is there a link to the Faerie Quests on the guild link bar? I'm sure there's a funny story about that! *nudge nudge* ~ ebola909
Actually... we have no idea. We're sure it's not a funny story, though. We dispensed with humor a while back.

In user.info (edit My Preferences), it says, "...all your REAL stats must be visible. Hiding or covering them (and retyping the info yourself) is not allowed." Does this just mean that users are not allowed to enter FAKE stats, OR are users also not allowed to have a big picture or object that covers everything up? ~ kvoels
Yes on both counts. All your correct, official information must be viewable to anyone who visits your account.

You can cover your shield, your sidebar, the top portion above your stats, etc. But all your text stats, your Neopets, and your trophies MUST be visible. If you don't like them taking up space, you can put them in a scrolling div somewhere out of the way. :) They just have to be legible by everyone.

Nooo! I'm too pretty to cover!

Hey TNT!! Okay, something really weird happened... I was playing on Neopets, and I had 0 Neopoints out of my bank. So, I was rummaging through my Inventory when a random event happened and it said 'a ghost steals 80 neopoints from you' And then when I refreshed the page, beside the word 'NP:' on the yellow bar at the top, it said '-80.' How is that possible?! I've been on Neopets for 8 months now (on my main account) and that's never happened to me before! What does it mean when it says NEGATIVE 80 NP?! ~ xaero_star14x
I guess those pesky ghosts decided to put you in debt! We're afraid you'll have to earn 80 NP back to get to a balance of 0. All joking aside though, if something goes horribly wrong, and you find yourself negative a substantial number of Neopoints (-10,000 or something), please make a bug report describing what you were doing at the time so we can fix any possible glitches that may have caused it.

And now... FLASH MAPS!
We'll try to be as brief as possible.

First, we have a new system for updating our maps. That's quite obvious. :) So to explain the reasoning behind it, lets take the High Street shops map as an example.

Prior to the new system, maps were edited by hand. In the case of High Street, there are about 15 versions of that one map. Different icons appear depending on age, country, language, etc. At times, there are more than this, but we'll use 15 in the example. Anyway, one change to this map meant that 15 versions would have to be updated. 15 isn't so bad. :) However when you multiply it by 11 languages, you end up with 165 GIFs needing to be altered and exported by hand (for the HTML version). Then another 165 SWFs (for Flash versions) that also needed to be exported by hand. That's 330 images! BY HAND! It took days for someone to compile all that and put it all together. Then there needed to be an image map for each base GIF variation. As you can imagine, it was a very, very tedious job and it required quite a lot of production time from various people.

Our new system uses something called Flash Turbine. It allows PHP (the scripting language we use here at Neopets) to generate SWFs automatically! Basically, an alteration to a map now only requires someone to use the fancy admin we built to modify some variables on a map's icon. Turbine then generates all the necessary SWF files for us. Days of work is now down to about 30 minutes. That's it. Our map editor is a very, very happy camper now.

As most people have guessed, this system ONLY works with SWFs. We can't use it to generate GIF files, and there's obviously no main art file for the map now, so we can't export GIFs manually. The SWFs have taken over. If you were using the HTML option, you're not alone. Quite a few of us here used it, too! But because of how long it was taking to do maps manually, a new solution had to be found and it was decided (based on various statistics... how many people had Flash, how many people were connecting to the site at what speeds, how many people actually used the HTML option, etc.) we'd use this new system instead.

We know you were hoping to hear something like "We're working on HTML maps, YAY!" but we won't lie to ya. ;) That's the scoop, and we all hope you can understand the necessity for the change. If anything comes along that might allow us to easily put GIF maps back in (and we've looked at a lot of solutions so far), we'll most certainly check into it, but until then, we're all SWF-bound.

Need more help?
If you have a question that you think should be answered, click here and you can use our submission form. The most common/bizarre questions will appear here next week.