The Complete Guide To Neoboard Pens

What is A Neoboard Pen

A neoboard pen, (Full name: Green Neoboard Pen) is an NC Mall item that can be found under the Specialty section of the NC Mall. They cost 300 NC each. Buying a single pen will give you 25% extra space for your posts on the board and in both your neosignature and neoHTML. This is equal to about 100 extra characters in your posts, for a total of 500, and 30 characters to your neosignature and neoHTML giving you a total of 150 characters for each. However, adding more neoboard pens will currently not increase these totals so they will remain at 500 and 150 respectively for as long as you have your account (assuming TNT doesn’t make changes to how the pens work).

Each pen acts as a complete, independent set of neoboard preferences, allowing you to set an avatar, font and neoTitle for each of your pens. You will also be able to name your pen, but more about that later. Hereafter whenever you go to post in your guild or on the neoboards, you will be able to choose between posting with your “default” font and avatar (this is the avatar that shows up on your user lookup) or posting with one of your pens. You will be able to see the names of your pens (assuming the colors haven’t been set in such a way that the pen names are the same as the background), which makes it easier to keep track of what font is stored where.

Pen Etiquette

While neoboard pens are a good thing, there is some general etiquette that should probably be followed. The first thing is that even if you have a lot of neoboard pens, try to limit yourself to posting with only one to two pens per board, three at the most. While I know I don’t personally follow this rule 100 % of the time, I have found through personal experience that people tend to get annoyed if you post with too many different fonts and avatars. I can see where they are coming from, though, since it can be confusing to keep track of someone’s posts if their font and avatar keep changing. If only the colors change, it can help deal with this problem somewhat. The second thing is.... well, there really is no second thing right now, but I needed something to justify the first. Anyways, moving on.

What’s the Point of A Neoboard Pen

Now I know I already explained how the pens work, but that question is most often followed up by “what’s the point”. Personally, I find that neoboard pens can be very useful. One use is if the colors of your font don’t work well in your guild. The pens are EXTREMELY handy here if you are chatting on the boards and in your guild at the same time. Another good use for them is when you’re making fonts. I use them a lot for font making so that I can keep multiple working copies of a font for side by side comparison if I can’t decide between one version or another. It’s also useful if you are making a font for someone else since you can keep your own font in place while still being able to test the font in progress. They’re also fun if you just can’t decide what avatar to use. Why stick to one avatar if you can alternate between three!

Naming Your Pens

I said I would come back to naming your pens later in the article and I have. I find that one of the most fun parts of neoboard pens were naming them. Personally about 98 % of my pen names were suggested by random Neopians. But in retrospect this may not have been the best idea. It can be a challenge at time to remember that “Bob” is the Number 6 Avatar with my strike font or that Cakerpuff holds my Grarrl Warrior avatar with the Royal Crown font. (These just happen to be two of my favourite font/avatar combinations). A smarter thing to do probably would have been to name each of the pens after the font and/or avatar associated with it. It can be hard at times, though, since you are limited to twelve characters for each of your pen names.

However, naming your pens is one of the most important steps, since the name is all you will get to see when posting on the neoboards. If you just use “Unnamed”, you will quickly find yourself confusing your pens and posting with that default avatar when you really meant to post with “Valiant”. So basically try to be as descriptive as possible with twelve characters when naming your pens.

How to Tell if Someone is Using A Neoboard Pen

Okay, this is really a how to but more like a list of ten ways to tell if someone is using a pen:

1. They post with a different avatar every post and are posting every minute (less if in a guild).

2. They post way more than they should be able to with a single post.

3. Their lookup shows them using one avatar, but they are posting with a different one.

4. Their lookup shows them using one avatar, but they show up on your sidebar with a totally different avatar. (Note: Whatever avatar your last neoboard pen is set to is the one you show up as using on the sidebar. Took me forever to understand until someone pointed it out to me.)

5. They mention something about not remembering what font their pen is set to. xD (Okay, so this one was a little obvious but it’s something I do a lot.)

Well, that’s it for now, folks. Glad I was able to share some of my insight with you on that wonderful magical item know as a neoboard pen. So next time you see someone posting with a neoboard pen, you can smile to yourself, knowing what they are up to. Or you can head over to the NC Mall, buy one yourself, and be the next person to run around changing your whole neoboard as fast as lightning!