Above is a pic of an old Neopets refresher

Well… We all know that neopets has random events that take place once in a great while… But how many of you know that people used to (some still do) take advantage of this? Back in the years 1999 - 2000 neopets was very vulnerable to something called the “refresher cheat”. This (at the time) was simply done by holding down the f5 (refresh) key. With a fast connection and patients (five minutes tops?) people were able to pull in at least 50k neopoints (in items).
The same year neopets started getting smart and found out about this “cheat”. They started taking action by requiring you to visit different pages (not just one page over and over again…). This worked for a short period of time…

Shortly after around 2001 users began to create macros to visit the site for them.
Most of these macros were click macros and generated very little NP…. Some of the smarter users of Neopia (advanced programmers) went to work to create a program that could spider the neopets website without a browser. One of the most well known neopets refreshing programs was known as NeoAdvanced.

Although Neopets is constantly changing the way logins are handled to combat these auto programs, programmers always find a way to work around them. Currently there are still a few underground Neopet refreshers… but most on the net are loaded with viruses.