Online Community~Neopets

Neopets is a site where you create a virtual pet to care for. You can play numerous games and participate in a variety of activities in order to gain items and stats/trophies for your account and for your pet. This part of Neopets IS VERY addicting. However, another wonderful aspect to this game is the cooperative community aspect. There are many ways to interact with the larger Neopian community through trading, shopping, contests run by the site and by chatting! Neopets provides many chat boards where you can create and/or comment on a limitless number of topic threads! However, there ARE some rules. Players under the age of 13 are not allowed to chat at all. They are also not allowed to send or receive email to/from other players. Boards are also monitored by filters and moniters who work for The Neopets Team (TNT). Players can have their accounts suspended or frozen for using inappropriate language, scamming, discussing INappropriate topics and other bad behavior. Unfortunately, this does not deter MANY people from behaving badly, rudely or downright MEANLY on the general boards! I have PERSONALLY been called names and people have been VERY rude/mean to me for asking a simple question, not understand the "unspoken rules" of the social environment or for no reason at all! I believe that in this online environment, as in many others, people are emboldened to behave even MORE poorly than they would face-to-face because they feel they have totaly anononimity!

I believe this is probably true in real life...there are always mean people wherever you go and those who would ruin the fun for everyone else. Because of the extent of the problems on the general chat boards and the sheer VOLUME of players, it is difficult to make any real connections with other neopians. Neopets therefore provides a more private, controlled chatting environment called a "Guild". I am the co-leader of a guild with my sister. We created a guild called "Seriously Fun Adults" for other adult players like ourselves who were like-minded and wanted to chat about real life and help eachother reach our neo-goals as well. Our guild is now over a year old and we have MANY of our original members still and are always added new ones.

Features of the guild: There is a chat board, you can create a poll for members to vote on, you can keep a guild calendar, post guild news and game tips etc on the guild homepage. The guild leader has COMPLETE control of who can be in the guild. You can opt to make your guild PRIVATE which means people can only join by private invitation. As leader, I can delete or suspend a member for bad behavior. I can delete messeges from the guild chat board and give others the power to do so also. THIS keeps the guild board clean of rude messeges and members. I believe the guild to be a much better example of a great online community than the greater context of Neopets itself. Because WE are a smaller group who have CHOSEN to create our OWN place. WE drive the topics of conversation which are generally friendly and open because we genuinely care about eachother and have formed friendships. The trick is maintaining old friendships while incorporating new members and making them feel welcome as well! Also, because I am a mother and wife and my sister is a college student we have attracted guild members who are usually either parents or in college! We have many things in common, therefore, to discuss in addition to our common goals in relation to the game we are all hopelessly addicted to! We have truly created a nice community for ourselves!