Thanks, Morningstar. I still feel bad for sticking my foot in it. Especially since Garmfay is catching flak for having asked.
I see they moved very quickly to close off all those clickies. Now those pages are gone, and your pet will say "boo hoo" if you visit them.
So I'm wondering why they didn't turn off the process_click links at the same time. Probably somebody was lurking here looking for loopholes. If so, they got a nice list of them.
The process_click links still work. I just tried one just now. I wasn't logged in so I won't get any NP. (Hopefully I won't get frozen, but I do have the toolbar so TNT could be keylogging me.)
That's what's so confusing, feather it all! If you click on those links, they still take you to the original sponsor websites. And many of those sponsor websites are still valid. The sponsors are still getting page views when you click those links. Maybe they're still getting paid for them, too; how can you tell?
And you can't tell whether the sponsors are paying TNT or not. You might
guess that they're not, once the original ad or game is gone. But you actually have no way of knowing what kind of deal the sponsors and TNT have.
If the link still takes you to a valid sponsor page and the sponsor is still paying TNT when you view it, I don't see why you shouldn't get NP for your trouble, regardless of how you actually find the link. As long as the link gives you your daily NP, it still might seem as if TNT approves of you clicking it.
It would be much better if, when any sponsor offer expires, the link automatically redirects you -- not to the sponsor's website -- but instead to the "boo hoo, that offer is no longer valid" webpage. Then you stop getting NP so you quit using the link. The sponsor sees a drop in page hits and realizes Neopets is a good place to advertise. There's no open loophole to exploit and no need for TNT to warn or freeze anybody. And nobody gets blamed when the promo finally ends.
I don't know enough about how TNT's website works, but so many other parts of the site automatically turn off and on at preset times -- Turmac, plot pages, etc. -- so I think they must be able to build an expiry date into other things like clickies and process_click links. Is it hard? or expensive? Why not do it?