Neocolours

It's sort of surreal that the pound is actually open for business. Like, I was much more excited this weekend than I am right now even though I finally have my four pet on one account.

Maybe it's because I feel kind of bad. I abandoned the pet I had been labbing on Sunday in an attempt to try and help my mom adopt her dream pet when the pound opened. Had I known he was going to be frozen (possibly forever) I would have held onto him. I figured since he was so newly placed in the pound that he wouldn't have been on any list and I could have picked him up on my side after I had transfered. I should have known better.

Congrats Jessi!

I transferred a pet away, so I am back to three pets on my main

Officer 1BDI wrote:...Oh, and you can not transfer Lutaris (guess it's good that I didn't want to transfer my own, then, but c'mon TNT).

Oh... piddle! I'd totally forgotten the Lutari's elevated sense of importance and that we weren't able to transfer them even before the pound went down. Well, that's scuppered the one thing I wanted to use the 'transfer' functionality for. Hmm, think again.

And, yup, I've never seen so many truly awful pet names as I did just now whilst pound surfing for a couple of minutes. If TNT ever need to free up database space, I'd recommend they start by fragging those.

Dr_Death could do with looking a bit more malevolent, and the Uni (Rose, was it?) looks to have been 'on the sauce' and is about to keel over. Otherwise it's all good

I'm just curious, is the Auto Adopt Link still working?

I was planning to move my second pet on my main account off that account so my battle pet coud benefit from all the faerie/kitchen quests. Instead I wound up bringing a third pet to my main in the hopes of a low collateral SuAP lend (been a lot of it going on lately). I'll give it a few months before I try to get it back down to only one pet.

But it was nice to be able to rearrange my pets. I've had two unused labs, and found a grundo named cereal_rapper that I made a lab rat on my second account.

Also, I have two pets with those old unconverted Halloween petpets, and I'm so relieved I can move them around now without fear of losing those petpets too.

Jamie wrote:I'm just curious, is the Auto Adopt Link still working?

http://www.neopets.com/process_adopt.ph ... ETNAMEHERE no longer works, I just tried using it on a random pet in the pound, since I have room and don't wish to pound anything today and I got a message saying the pound is down for maintenance.

There may be a new link going around, but I haven't heard of one.

I tried neopets.com/pound/process_adopt.phtml?pet_name=PETNAMEHERE, and that didn't work either, though it gave me a different error: "This Neopet could not be found".

Ooga's link's correct, but as far as I can tell from the coding, it's not going to work. I'm not going to claim that it's completely impossible, but basically: the script says that it does use neopets.com/pound/process_adopt.phtml in order to adopt a pet. However, while the old script used to look at pet_name=NAME to determine NAME, the new script uses the NAME sent by the previous page, and you can't fiddle the URL to get around that because it simply doesn't check the URL for a name anymore. If you copy and paste that link, there isn't a previous page for it to try and get a name from, so it acts as if you submitted a request to adopt a pet with no name, and that pet doesn't exist.

As an analogy, think of it like a group of people trying to tell me something, but I will only believe it if it comes from Ooga, because I trust her. Ooga can tell me about it, but I won't listen to anyone else, even though they might be saying the same thing, because I don't trust them and will just ignore what they're saying. Similarly, you can put what you like in the URL and it's going to ignore it - it doesn't matter whether the pet's really in the pound or not, it's not even going to bother to check. It isn't looking there to find the information it needs, and the place it is looking is empty - like Ooga isn't around to tell me. I won't suddenly listen to these other people just because she isn't there.

This new system is probably more secure, though I'm not sure the old system was exactly insecure - back to the analogy, the people I don't trust might still be telling the truth, but I've no way of checking. They might be saying something harmful. But if I only listen to one source, and I completely trust their reliability, then I know that what they've told me is correct, and I can act on it. It's quite possible the old quick adopt link was potentially exploitable, while this one shouldn't be, because it only accepts input from Neopets itself, not just anything a random user can type in.

That's very interesting- thanks for the explanation, Jazzy. It would make sense for them to code it like that- before, whilst there might have been a problem with the link being able to be exploited they wouldn't want to make it unavailable as there was no better way for people to transfer their pets. Now that there is a secure way of transferring a pet, a direct adoptions link is not necessary. It might annoy some people, because they've already used up their transfer for the month, but if anything it should serve to stop people from trying to transfer by abandoning because there is so little security.

EDIT: so it seems that there's a limit to how often you can transfer an individual pet:

Error: Wordless does not want to be User-to-User Transfered right now. Perhaps in a few days it will be okay.

I moved him on to my main because I needed the draik avatar, but I thought I would be able to move him off again immediately, using April's transfer off. However, it seems that I can't and will have to wait. I don't need him to be moved urgently, so it doesn't bother me that much. It will make avatar lending more complicated, though.

For example, I remember the problems we used to have of people "stalking" a particular pet and using autorefresh to intercept the transfer.

It's annoying that now we're REALLY limited to one transfer a month, but might also stop a lot of problems with intercepted transfers, too.

I vote that some sort of adoptions board, at least temporarily, might be a useful thing while everyone gets pets sorted out.

As an aside, I also have 3 pets up for adotion (possibly 4):

Shelatai the female Maraquan Aisha
Dhamaral the male Faerie Buzz
Reeling the male Ice Wocky

MAYBE meimoso the male Maraquan Buzz -- I never really got attached to him and don't really care for the new Maraquan Buzz. I got him from someone at NC but no longer recall who, so if he was yours and you want him back, LMK!

EDIT: Ooo, if you can't move a pet on and move it immediately back off again... that sucks. Neopets doesn't have anything against avatar lending as far as I know, I wonder why they set it up like that?

Someone told me that you have to wait exactly 24 hours before you can transfer a transferred pet again, but I don't know where they got that information.

One thing which would be interesting to know, from anyone who has transferred a pet: if you have paintbrush clothing on it which isn't correct for its base colour, does that clothing go with it. So, say you have a blue draik wearing the Christmas draik's clothing: does that Christmas clothing get transferred too? I hope that it can be.

Yeah, it means there's no real advantage to autorefreshing the Pound any more, which is convenient for Neopets, since they don't want to be policing that if they don't have to. Potentially, though I don't think anyone ever successfully managed it, it might also be possible to perform some sort of attack using malformed code in the URL, whereas the new coding would just ignore it.

I can think of a potential way to get round the restrictions (some of you are likely to have reached the same conclusion from reading my first post, it's straightforward logic), but I don't want to test it, because I wouldn't be surprised if that kind of thing could get you frozen.

As for avatar lending - I think they aren't keen on it. They're not exactly against it, but they'd probably like to discourage it, because it's a pain in the neck for them when people start drama over a pet not being moved on from an account.

Will put the Adoptions board up now.

daisybell wrote:One thing which would be interesting to know, from anyone who has transferred a pet: if you have paintbrush clothing on it which isn't correct for its base colour, does that clothing go with it. So, say you have a blue draik wearing the Christmas draik's clothing: does that Christmas clothing get transferred too? I hope that it can be.

I won't be able to test this myself until May, but I'm also hoping this is the case.

Joy! I just transferred a pet from a lab account to her permanent spot. It was easy and not at all anxiety-inducing.

I love this new feature.