What is Leopets? 

haha what a blast from the past finding this video was, I was part of Leopets from the very beginning and since your video is the only thing in existence attempting to talk about the history of it now that it's shut down, I'd like to shed some light on some of the darker parts of its history and creator. The site creator, Panda (who went by Laska at the time) herself was really immature and spiteful and she loooved attention and people praising her. I honestly believe that was the main motivation for why she continued to go on Leopets at all those first few years, because she knew every time she did she'd have leopians calling her a god and praising the ground she walked on for making the site. She played favorites pretty severely, too... If you agreed with her enough and defended her enough to be considered one of the "good ones", you would get a ton of freebies like painted pets, rare pets, items, etc. But if she didn't like you for whatever reason (and she had some pretty petty reasons for disliking people, everything from disagreeing with her once, grudges she carried over from other sites, if you had a pet she wanted on Neopets she was jealous of, or even if you got more attention than she did), she'd find some made up reason to ban you pretty fast. I remember when I was still in her good graces she told me that she would create fake accounts on leo to troll the users she didn't like, flaming them on the boards or through leomail. Laska found a ton of ways to just stir up drama in general since she could hide behind the anonymity of her own coding and admin powers, and if anyone tried to call her out on it, they'd get banned pretty fast, followed up with Laska's numerous fangirls shit-talking the banned "drama llamas" all over the boards. The Encyclopedia Dramatica article on Laska is pretty eyerolling in the way its written, but the stuff it has about her being a racist and a homophobe are actually all accurate. I stopped playing regularly around 2008 because I thought the community on Leopets was so toxic, but I would still log in occasionally to keep my account from being deleted. I know the site changed ownership for the first time around 2008/2009 and was then run by Tiger instead of Laska, so maybe from that point on things got better in the leopets community. I can't really comment on that though because by that time I never went on the boards at all. I'd have to think that without Laska around and purposely stirring up drama and pitting people against each other it would have been a lot better though. OH I almost forgot, one of the worst things Laska probably did while I was still active on Leopets was hack a bunch of leopians' neopets accounts sometime between 2008 -2009 and either take their pets, all their NP and their inventory, or just abandon their pets out of spite. When Leopets first started, she advertised it on another neopets fansite, Neopound.com. A huge number of the regulars from Neopound were among the first users on Leopets, and as admin and creator of leopets, Laska soon discovered that a LOT of people didn't use a different password on Leopets than on Neopets. After Leopets had been established for a year or two and a ton of people were getting banned on Leopets for making Laska mad for whatever petty reason, a lot of them would make boards on Neopound to plead their cases or vent about the unfairness or even to spill the beans about some of the things they knew about Laska's shitty behavior because they knew a ton of leopians still went on Neopound. That really annoyed laska so she exploited the fact that one of the Neopound moderators, Nochi, used the same password on Leopets as on the Neopound boards. She logged into Nochi's account on Neopound and did a massive wipe of the site, deleting a tooooon of the boards and threads. She deleted nearly all of the ones that made mention of herself or Leopets, and then a bunch of other random unrelated ones to try to cover her tracks. Then she took advantage of the confusion going on on Neopound and used the opportunity to actually hack leopians' Neopets accounts and wreak havoc on people she didn't like (which was a massive amount of people... Laska was great at making enemies). She stole a bunch of pets from other people she had coveted for awhile (but stored them on side accounts that looked unrelated to her), or looted their inventories and bank, or just straight up pounded the pets of people she didn't like out of spite (including some draiks and krawks that at the time were super rare and expensive). Laska was honestly a really really awful human being back then, and I'm alarmed to find out from this video that she is raising kids now. I sincerely hope for her kids' sake that she's matured and isn't the same spiteful, short tempered, passive aggressive, and hateful woman she was, but given that she was a fully grown adult that was already almost 30 back when she hacking or anonymously flaming the people that had joined her site and donated actual money to keep Leopets going, most of them teens and preteens, I'm not really holding my breath.

I never even knew this existed :(

Leopets was fun. To be honest, it was dying for a long time. I was able to join during a reg window 3-4 years ago, but the community was always small, and it was always full of people who expected a lot out of others. To be honest the community was not incredible. Also - and dont quote me on this - some users figured out a way to exploit a glitch to create neopoints. The wealth gap was disproportionate, and users would pay large amounts of money for art but the money came from only around 10 people. Leopets was on its way down for a long time - unfortunately because it was a wonderful idea, they made it much too hard to get into the site even when reg was open, which led to only people inviting their friends and the community becoming pretty bad. It was definitely not just 1 person who was openly ripping on it while playing, there was a lot broken. Thanks for this video though - it's really neat. I had no idea it closed since I hadn't been active for such a long time.

Hi Julie, my name is Provie, I was a staff member on Leopets. Interesting video, I'm sorry that Leo registration was so wonky when you were interested. The three main staffers of Leopets did not have much control towards the end, and we had an MIA programmer, so the application system wasn't functional. I was not the one to respond to your message on Facebook, but I believe my fellow staff member might have been trying to be careful with exposure, not wanting Leopets to become targeted by Neopets or anything like that. From my perspective as staff, Panda handed off the site to Lana and Nathan without consulting us, lots of people supported them, but there were a few people who were rude to them and they decided they didn't want anything to do with the site, even though all the old staff tried to be supportive, but as you kinda said the squeaky wheels were heard more loudly than the others. I am sorry to see Leo go as well, I feel very bad for the community. If you have any questions feel free to message the Leo facebook or message me here (i don't know if youtube even has PMs though haha)

I really would have liked to play this :'( I miss the old neopets experience.

I never got into Leopets, partly because I, ironically, didn't like panda. I had some run ins with her on neopets itself and she always rubbed me the wrong way. Part it was from a long time ago when she was adopting out some of her pets, and had us go through a VERY lengthy application process, and had chosen me for one of her pets then last second went 'meh, nevermind I don't want to do it anymore' and that reeeeeeally bothered me so I never really liked her after that. I know it's more of a personal thing, but it made me not want to get involved with leopets at all. What made it worse was the pet's name is all that mattered to me. She had the name of my first cat, who I loved so dearly and the chance to get her as a tribute on Neopets was so amazing I put so much into the application. So just to have her suddenly change her mind....really upset me. Oh, and just to clarify this was right as conversion happened. She had some other pets available for adoption to but after conversion went through she decided she wanted to keep the unconverted ones and never adopted any of them out after having people go through months of applications. (she would choose some people, have them touch up the applications, choose a few more so it was a finalists thing) then for some reason she ended up converting the pet anyhow(she was a fairy draik so not sure why she decided on that...) it still hurt though. I ended up giving her the droolick I had purchased to give to her(was going to make her a gray kougra and give her the droolick in remembrance to the dog I lost) and she agreed to give the pet pet to the draik and kept the name maya so I guess there was that. But I suppose I am one of those people that once you rub me the wrong way, it's hard to ever regain my trust again. So Leopets had a bad taste in my mouth because of that incident and I could never bring myself to really like her.

Leopets 3.0 is now in beta testing. The new owners (Aquarius/Sagittarius) wish to remain anonymous as to which Leousers they actually are. The new site build is coming online quickly :3 Currently beta testers can only have one pet. Keep watching the front page! Applications open on the first of every month

As someone who was apart of Leo for almost 10 years (since I was 15.. lol...) it's kind of hilarious to see someone make a video on the site. Don't get me wrong, it was interesting to watch but it's kind of bizarre to see someone's outside opinion on the whole thing that ended up the way it did, haha. But hey, if you want a more detailed accounts on what went down or more info on Leo we have a private discord (where we talk about random crap mostly haha) that I could see if I could grab you an invite for multiple user feedback, you seem pretty interested after all!

I wish i knew about this sooner.. :o

Leo ain't dead yet; we're still working it out onsite.

Thank you so much for this video, Julie. I never knew that all these spectacular pets existed! For years I wanted to join the site...but I always forgot to apply when the 1st of the month came. I know I could've just set a reminder on my phone, but I always just "thought i'd remember". Hah! My memory is THE worst! And about that Draik Egg price...damn! I remember seeing tons of people with their siggy set as "Draik Fund : #/15mil"....it's just crazy to think that everyone(including me) thought that was a possible goal.

I wish that I had known this site existed a long time ago. I remember being sad that Neopets changed so much and I would have loved to go on a site like this. I hope another site like this pops up soon. Also I'm new to your channel, and I'm definitely subscribing cause I go on a lot of pet sims as well, mainly Mweor and Lioden at the moment. (Although lioden is less of a pet sim and more like you are a lion sim)

I was part of the Leopets community (Ryu) and have to say that the current situation is quite ugly. This is what happens right now from my perspective: Leopets was taken over by L/N (will wite their names like this because it is shorter.) Someone made an board that escalated quite a lot and we had months of silence and no updates afterwards. Until the beginning of april where N mentioned that L isn't sure if she wants to work on leo again. This escalated thanks to 1-2 people AGAIN and they pulled the plug. Majority is locked out of the site and doesn't know what is going on. A few people were allowed back in to "Discuss the future" while the rest of us sits in a discord channel in limbo not able to do anything except for trying to keep contact with each other and are quite salty about the situation. And now something I just copy pasted from somewhere else I wrote this: "It is really terrible what is going on. People are kicked out (even if temporairly), both sides talking about each other while one side actually can see what the others say but not vise versa. And when someone is kind enough to give out some informations and says that they aren't set in stone yet to the people that wanna know what the heck is going on, this person gets kicked out and gets called a liar from the "exclusive club" people that seem to love getting discord stuff BUT DARE TO SHOW THE DISCORD PEOPLE WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON ON LEOPETS... Seriously. THIS MAKES ME ANGRIER THAN THE WHOLE LEOPETS IS GONE STORY. MUCH MUCH ANGRIER... *takes a deep breath* The whole leopets is gone thing just disappointed and saddend me. And I tried to understand both sides. As someone with social phobia I can understand why L/N disappeared. I tend to nope out when I feel uncomfortable too. But when you wanna run a website this shouldn't happen even when you get thrown into the cold water of an drama happy community.. drama can happen everywhere at everytime. THis makes me wonder how they would've dealt with this on old neo if leopets would've never been taken over.. (first they only wanted to make old neo again but the whole community misunderstood and they kindly decided to take over the community and fuse both sites) You have to say STOP before this happens to the people causing why you feel uncomfortable. On the other hand I can understand people being frustraded and needing a place to let this frustration out. Seriously.. I am so done about this whole situation. THis whole Situation makes me feel like an pidgeon waiting for an old lady to throw breadcrumbs of informations at me. An old kind lady that gets kicked down from her bench so young people can sit and drink like crazy on there..." Right now I am not sure if I will really return to leopets if Panda decides to open it up again. But the new old neo site? Well as far as L/N handled stuff so far I will not join that one for sure. I can't say more about the whole situation and what is going on because this is basically everything I know about it and just wanted to share that there actually is quite an ugly side about the whole situation.

I was apart of Leopets for 3 years but the site got totally wiped back in summer 2017, thus my account and all my leopets gone. I miss them but it's only a virtual site after all. The programmer, Panda claimed she was too busy and gave the site to someone else. I thought about going back but risk having my account deleted again and also so much drama that went on the site and overly sensitive people, I've actually been happier without the sites. You have a few clicks there and trolls. It use to be a very fun site and the community was very friendly and nice but you step on the wrong toes and people are overly sensitive and hold grudges, can be toxic, like many sites. I will however miss the angel and shenkuu pets and having music codes on my lookups/pages, and how the coding was way more relax/chill than neopets strict rules of html codes.

I'm more of a new/younger fur and I'm trying to find s game where I can roleplay with my friends online because we just need something to do and surprisingly I haven't seen many games that are furry related and online the only games I've seen that are like that is animal jam and furvilla and this game we seriously need more online furry based games. Who knows maybe I'm not looking hard enough but I hope I find some because I really like roleplaying it's really fun

The heads of the Leopets community always struck me as being a bit touchy and emotionally immature. So, sad as it is, I'm not the least bit surprised that they didn't last long.

This is a very good videos on Leopets. I never got to have a account myself but I wish I could several years ago

Leopets is still up but I'd never heard of it

Oh man wished I knew about Leopets when I was still into Neopets.

This really saddens me... :( I had quite a few characters (pets) that I was working on, including a large amount of art and coding. I was quite attached to them... I hope they come back someday, but it doesn't sound promising...

I wish i had leopets account. I would have loved to have pets on leopets. I have feeling i would have liked leopets.

When it comes to fans supporting older versions of games, there's also Pre-CU and Pre-NGE Star Wars Galaxies.

ah I really miss leopets even tho it was dying down :'''( I genuinely loved my pets and coming up with designs for them and talking to other artists. I had a darigan kankiru, like the one that you showed actually, I really loved that species. I was hoping to one day design a custom species or color too but oh well! thanks for covering leo and great job on the video as always btw!

I was part of leopets about 5 years ago? Boy, it was an experience. I left with no ill-will towards anyone or the site, but there was some weird stuff going on there (seconding on the wealth gap comment, especially). As you could say with any other small regulated community, it wasn't something just anyone could jump into and be a welcome member, which stunk. It was such a neat concept and idea tho, but it's totally understandable that it kind of ended up the way it did >.> I always hoped they'd get over the issues they had when I was there, but it just sounds like it slowly escalated over the next couple of years instead of resolving.

I haven't played Leo or Neo pets at all, but I was reading through some heavily, neatly written comments and I have to say that this Panda person seemed very toxic, and how Lana and Nathan kept people on the edge of their seats waiting, when they could have just said "Leopets is closing" instead of randomly deleting it is absolutely horrible. Too many people lost good memories. I wish I could say I would like to try Leopets 3.0 but I couldn't from what I've heard. I played Chicken Smoothie and I hated it (mods weren't as nice as I hoped either) , so I'm sticking to Flight Rising because it is simple, but has so much lore which makes it fun. CS on the other hand is very complicated with absolutely no lore at all.

I always wanted an account but every time i applied i got rejected. I also forgot to apply a few times. Now its closed arghhh

it's not closed though. they have registarations on the first day of every month according to their twitter @leoleopets

Checked the Leopets.net website and there is an August 1st 2017 update! "We are aware that some users are having trouble submitting their applications. We have fixed some issues with it but some remain ongoing. If your application has not gone through you can try resubmitting it. If it still does not work you may have to wait until next time applications open while our programmers can work on it. Thank you for your understanding. We have also had hundreds and hundreds of applications already so it may take us up to a month to get back to everybody."

Never heard of this until today, and on their twitter just yesterday they announce they are shutting down. I think I would have liked playing there if I ever had a chance. Oh well.

I finally got in two days ago, im so happy.

What bothers me about this is that it's blatantly illegal, whereas it could be completely legal if they took the IDEA and made their own IP.

Such an awesome idea... I loved Neopets before the ads and associated changes (ew NC) came in. I would have absolutely loved Leopets if I got a chance.

I had an account on there for a long while. It was fun, had some friends there but it went down for a LONG time and when I went back I could never seem to get my account re-activated. Bye pretty pets.

Update: As of Oct. 1st 2017, Leopets is allowing new users to register. November first Julie! You could hop in and see what its like. I plan to do a little poking around as well. Exclusivity breeds desire!

i'm so excited, i hope they accept my application to join. i'm so interested to see how this stuff works out.

I don't understand why you have to apply to join, as if it is a job

A piñata color!? Man, I'm trying to make a piñata pet atm. Literally the only option is a rainbow pet (went with Kau) and an NC piñata top.

Was trying to stay off the topic of WoW by digging through random videos and when this video opened up with it I choked on air because a d d i c t i o n.

FINALLY FOUND IT, LEO’S PET

pirate draike egg barely goes for 100k nowadays

Leopets reminds me of the neopets I grew up with.. the side bar not the top bar. :D

rip leopets

impressive.....

Dammit! I'm always late to the party!

i never played leopets for a long time and to be honest i never created my own neopets account and i didn't get much neopoints and i didn't even earn it cause the game may be hard challenged and i am petless without my pet and petpet as well and i never did my leopet and other game i could've played for a long time back in my childhood years.

I remember seeing some images for Leopets on DA a few years ago, I really wanted to join, but I was 10 back then. I'm 13 now and I'm extremely upset by this. From what you were saying, Leopet's community seemed like the coolest thing ever to me!

I wish I knew how to make sites like that... I'd love to take a crack at a pet sim. I got the artistic skills, but I'm not a coder in the least DX

were you a teacher?

You mean neopets?

GOOD FYORA! I went to leo today to see if my application from november was reviewed... and... AND... * sniff* THE DOMAIN WAS AVAILABLE! LEOPETS.NET WAS *EMPTY*! WHAT THE HELL?

If you would excuse me I will delete my talking tom and reinstall it this has nothing to do with this video

After Neopets released the customisable pets, I lost interest an moved on to Subeta. If I could remember my old accounts and passwords, it would be interesting to revisit Neopets again. I also recently discovered, that Neopets' had a huge password leak. Have I been pwned site had this information: Neopets: In May 2016, a set of breached data originating from the virtual pet website "Neopets" was found being traded online. Allegedly hacked "several years earlier", the data contains sensitive personal information including birthdates, genders and names as well as almost 27 million unique email addresses. Passwords were stored in plain text and IP addresses were also present in the breach. Compromised data: Dates of birth, Email addresses, Genders, Geographic locations, IP addresses, Names, Passwords, Usernames

I never even could figure out Neopets. I liked the game, but never got the hang of how to get neo-money, and on how to get all the cool items!

Darn things been wiped totally

70th view !

Leopets is gone :( no one there now its gone no one can join!

kikoooooooooooooooooooo

Even rip offs are having problems lmao.

i want an account so bad

first lol jk is leopets a good game

You should make sims 4 on video

You should play world of Warcraft shadowlands

Neopets ripoff

borringgggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggg