i guess i should further summarize what happened on neopets since it's definitely the most activity i've seen since the profanity filter broke, and it represents a culmination of the black market problems that like, even polygon wrote about, as well as the inch-by-inch backpedaling that jumpstart's had to do since binary_supagoo first fucked up
>8pm on a weekend, mods are asleep
>someone posts a bait board claiming that certain people know how to generate items and unconvert pets via a publicly accessible link that they decline to share, but they have a days old UC tyrannian quiggle on them as proof, and that this is how black market sellers get UCs to sell other than through account theft
>they also include a list of 3,000 pet names they claim are illegal UCs, a handful were in circulation, most were on shell accounts waiting to be sold for real money or seemingly inactive
>op is iced and thread is deleted in somewhere under or around an hour, the quiggle gets converted, other users and the op themselves on reddit claim op was able to re-unconvert it even after they were banned via the exploit (this could admittedly be attributed to caching issues but is in line with how the exploit apparently worked)
>over on r/neopets, user claiming to be op had tried to post about the exploit on r/neopets two days prior with a thread called "the truth about UCs" but the post got auto-modded, states their intention was to force jumpstart to fix the exploit by making it public (jumpstart has, admittedly, been known to ignore site exploits if they're not made public)
>inevitably rumors start circulating, everyone who has a UC but didn't see the list when it went live gets spooked, tons of people asking if theirs are on the list or not, people start worrying about potential malicious usage of the exploit or the possibility that op false flagged legit UCs or could unconvert random people's UCs, everyone is asking for UCs or baiting people into unconverting their UCs to see if it's legit, and it's just pages upon pages of this
>meanwhile, someone is also dumping UCs into the pound, causing minor chaos even amongst people who were not watching pound chat
>two relatively well-known neopets users in the threads somehow allegedly get access to the exploit as well, further promise to use it to bring more attention to it, both are iced. because these were both generally well-liked players in the community, people are now also mad that they got iced.
>a couple hours later, jumpstart makes a statement acknowledging the exploit, state it's fixed, and finally admits they're working on an option to make new UCs after years of pretending it was impossible or just refusing to entertain the idea. op on reddit also states the exploit is fixed now. the possibility of UCs being devalued in the future spurs a minor frenzy of people trying to trade for valuable petnames instead. because pound chat never changes.
