Were there any fun locations for the Neopets explore page that was discarded while being planned or before being released.
And uh… do you happen to have any information on Lilac Island? It was one of the old Neopedia articles back in the day along with Roo Island and Kiko Lake. While Kiko Lake and Roo Island eventually became visitable, Lilac Island was unceremoniously deleted and the articles are now lost. Are deleted content kept anywhere or something?
Hiya, Jay. No significant unused lands that I remember. (At least not from my time; there could be ones from before I started.) We generally only brainstormed new lands when we needed them, and for a specific purpose or story, so we didn’t have a lot of unused ones sitting around! Especially when the map started getting full and space was scarce.
Both Roo Island and Kiko Lake were released the year after I started but I’ve never heard of Lilac Island! Neopedia articles were always written either by request when we needed something specifically explained or, more frequently, by a writer whenever they wanted to get creative. ? I couldn’t tell you which one that article was. Could be the writer added a third island to the entry for interest, or it could have been planned as a legitimate third island and that feel through. I would bet it was a matter of having added the first two island and then wanting to change up the pace rather than doing yet another island. But that’s just a guess! Sorry I don’t have better any insight for you.
As for deleted content, it depends. During my time:
Code and functionality existed on the site only so unless there was a specific backup somewhere, it would have been gone after deletion.
Art was drawn and saved on shared working servers before it was uploaded to the site. So if it were ever deleted from the site, it likely would still have existed on the server.
Writing was done in documents and sent to the programmers for implementation on the site. Those documents were also saved to a shared working server. So some of that would have likely still existed there after deletion from the site. HOWEVER, Neopedias specifically had their own admin, where the writers could enter and launch them whenever they wanted without a programmer. Some of the writers wrote directly in there instead of saving to a document on the server first so those would have been lost if they were deleted.
I hope that answered your questions!