State of the CoasterBuzz - 2018

That would honestly be a great feature to add.

I enjoy CoasterBuzz as is right now and this is my only site for amusement park/coaster news. I realized a couple months ago that I have not been to Screamscape in probably 4 years now. CoasterBuzz provides everything I need these days for keeping track of this industry.

While I have been a member since 2006 I have only recently started posting. I originally joined Guide to the Point when Millennium Force was being built and kept mostly to that site, eventually coming over to CoasterBuzz to join the club back when I still went to events, mostly Hollywood Nights (was that the name?). The quality of discussion here and at PointBuzz is what keeps me coming back. When you compare to other fan sites, CoasterBuzz feels like the place where the adults hang out for actual conversation. I do have an account at TPR but mostly just to read up on projects I've had a hand in helping create otherwise I can't stand the crap that is posted there. It is just as bad as what you find in Facebook posts which is also why I don't take part in coaster talk there either. For me I'd rather keep it in one place, here at CoasterBuzz. Plus I love the layout and design of these forums. They look professional and in my opinion are 100 times better than anything phpBB can do. When I visit a forum using phpBB I feel like I am looking at a website still being built by a kid in high school.

I totally get the online community and that great friendships can come about because of sites like these. Between PointBuzz and CoasterBuzz I think I have only ever met Walt though. A few other members I knew before joining the site but at the parks I have never been the kinda person to just walk up and start a chat. I should probably try that sometime since some of you I have been talking to on here for 10+ years. I have never used the Meeting Calendar and until last night I had never clicked on it. Maybe the next time I hit up Epcot or Universal I will add it and see what happens.

Jeff the site is great. I understand sometimes change needs to happen but I like it the way it is. As long as I can get my news and chat about that news then you've done your job in my eyes.

The autocomplete box would work - slightly tricky because there's a bunch of coasters named "Wildcat" or "Batman" so you'd have to concatenate with the park name or something. But I think that would be more intuitive. Only really if you're looking for a project. I brought it up because the track record is a nice feature that I think a lot of people would like.

I have been a lurker for many years, but today decided that it was time to join the club and get all the honors and benefits. Hopefully its not just a crummy commericial!

Ralphie said:

My decoder pen!

All right!

"Be it known to all that Ralph Parker is hereby appointed...

"a member of the Little Orphan Annie secret circle and...

"is entitled to all the honors and benefits occurring thereto."

Signed, Little Orphan Annie.

Countersigned, Pierre Andre!

My membership letter had better be signed by Little Orphan Annie and Countersigned by Pierre Andre!

It'll come out of my printer and the envelope will have an official stamp from the US government. How's that for fancy?

So, most of what I do around Coasterbuzz is mostly reading. I try to add a funny quip every now and then as humor is my favorite part of life.

Now, my current membership hasn't been that long, but I have had been a member more than once under different screen names, and not intentionally. After years and years of drug abuse, my mind has become clearer than ever. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to recover previous screen names or passwords.

Honestly, I can't even recall what brought me here in the first place. Maybe I Googled coaster forums or fan sites. Really I have no idea. What has kept me here is the conversations here are way different than anywhere else. The maturity level is above other forums. Not to say I haven't seen some silly immaturity, but that is in good fun and it's not constant. The content here is like nothing else. It's highly informative and I enjoy the exclusive interviews. I also enjoy our derailed conversations as well. Sometimes I learn something new.

I don't personally know anyone from this site and that's ok with me as I do not intend to meet anyone from here. And that is nothing personal. It's just that when I am at a park, it's my very valuable family time. My son is 9 and as many of you here know, they aren't small for very long. I already had to miss a year of his life due to my previous addiction, so I value my time with him way more than ever.

In closing, I don't have any suggestions to make to improve this site. In the words of Billy Joel, " I love you just the way you are".

I appreciate everything you've done keeping this site going! I really can't think of anything to do different. I like to keep things simple and that's what I think this site does. Besides CB, I visit PB, TPR and CoasterCrazy (as they have a lot of discussions on overseas parks). I do not post often. Mostly a lurker over the years. My passion for coasters hasn't changer over the years even though I haven't been able to afford any trips for some time now (over two years since my last coaster ride). I love getting on these sites and reading the latest news and discussions.

Hello! I just wanted to say that I really enjoy CoasterBuzz. I started listening to the podcast years ago when I won an iPod from Coke and really enjoyed hearing all the news about the parks in my home state of Ohio. I also discovered that I had been a "coaster enthusiast" for years and didn't even know such a thing existed. I eventually found my way to this site, which I find very helpful in keeping up with the latest amusement park news. I rarely check it in the winter, but check it often in the spring and summer when planning for upcoming park visits. I genuinely enjoy reading people's comments about the news here, but very rarely ever post myself, often because I usually visit the site on my phone while I am waiting for something else. To be honest, I have never used any of the other functions on the site and don't know much about them. I would be sad to see CoasterBuzz go though.

This year, I'll be coming full circle in CBuzz terms. I first joined PointBuzz and later CB almost 16 years ago, when my kids were three and one, respectively. We took a long weekend in August '02 to Cedar Point as our first family vacation for the four of us. That place has a ton of memories for me, both as a kid and with my own kids. We've since been to I-don't-know-how-many parks on a couple of continents, and had a great time. About five years ago, I'd drifted away for a variety of reasons not worth getting into here, some of which involve not taking care of myself physically or emotionally. I still went to Florida and WDW often, but many of those were solo trips again for reasons that aren't relevant.

Over the past six months, I've gotten my sh*t together and started working on my health writ large. Near the beginning of this process, it occurred to me that I hadn't been to Cedar Point in a LONG time, and on a whim bought an '18 platinum pass which comped me a day in the '17 season. The memories started flooding back for good and ill and it was a surprisingly powerful thing.

Those of us who have been here a while know that parks are not about riding a bunch of rides. They are about spending time with friends and family in a way that's hard to do in the process of day-to-day life. I had gotten away from that in my life. I'm still in my recovery/rebuilding process, but it will be good to work toward being a better version of me and reconnect with my family, and the parks will be one way to do that. My daughter has always been my main partner-in-coaster-crime, and the two of us are now going to hit CoasterStock and maybe do a few other things this season. I may even sneak away to Florida at the end of the month with my son if I can snag a last-minute opportunity.

Thanks for sharing that. Very touching. And I don’t mean that sarcastically at all...

I know what you mean about building memories. My son and I have a blast at different parks, CP being our favorite, even more than FL theme parks. I’ve enjoyed watching him “conquer” different levels of rides.

That said, my favorite 2.5 days of the year is the trip a buddy and I take for CoasterMania, no wives and no kids.

I'm sure your wife and kids will be happy to learn some day that your favorites days of your life were the one you spent purposely without them.

And I mean that sarcastically.

Gotta understand though, that’s pretty much the only time through the year where I’m only worried about myself. And the wife is already well aware. The boy thinks I go to Ohio for work training.

Oh I got it. In truth, I think taking time to ourselves is something more humans/couples/marriages would benefit from.

I don't have too much to add onto what has already been said, other than that this site is certainly my go-to for anything happening in the amusement/theme park universe. Sometime in the early 2000's I discovered sites like this existed, and I remember bouncing back and forth between two different places; Pointbuzz and ThePointOl (I think that was the name) right around the time the mystery of Dragster's construction was ramping up. It was just so fun and addicting to be able to read about the project, when as a kid you simply waited for a commercial to pop up in the Spring about what might be coming to Cedar Point.

What stood out, and still does, was the ease of navigation of the Pointbuzz layout, and I finally joined on Wednesday, June 1, 2005, at 10:27 AM. I wonder what the weather was like that day. For those of who you don't cross sites, my screen-name there is "KevinJ". For some reason I don't remember, I used Ohiostater as my screen name here when I hopped aboard almost a year later. I used the same picture, but different names; sure, why not?

At any rate, beyond the news and updates, it's the conversations that happen here that truly make it stand out. And as in years past, whenever I find myself on another forum on some other topic I am instantly reminded of how user-friendly this forum is.

I have been a member here since 2010 and Pointbuzz since 2007.

I honestly use the database here more than anything to track what coasters I have ridden and parks I have visited.

I would really hate to see that go away. I also browse the forums to see what happening. I am really hoping my daughter hits the 48" mark this Summer so I can really share some new roller coasters with her this year!

We are going to Silver Dollar City for the first time this year, and she has already visited all 4 Disney World Parks, Cedar Point and Kings Island. As soon as she is really tall enough to enjoy some coasters we will start hitting more parks again, the way I did before children.

A quick update on the advertising...

Google recently introduced something called "auto ads" to their lineup. The executive summary is that the machines learn about how your pages are used and viewed, and find the appropriate places to insert ads. As you may recall from my first post, they keep holding back a third of the revenue for "invalid traffic," which isn't particularly descriptive, but I assume it's because sometimes the ads just aren't seen (when you are directed to the newest post in a thread, for example). I'm assuming that their intention with auto ads is to help remedy that problem.

It looks like these ads are appearing inline with forum posts, and on mobile an occasional floating ad at the top. They don't strike me as horrible intrusive, easy enough to scroll over, so I'm going to give them a shot. Of course, club members will not see these.

For those who don't get the newsletter, I pushed a "new" version of the site this evening, which is to say that it's actually a port of the old site to a bunch of new frameworks. It should be functionally equivalent, but it's certainly possible some things might be broken.

For the software nerds... I've actually been working on the the forum for literally years, but the ecosystem for this new stuff has been, to say the least, slow to come along. Image resizing in particular was rough.

On the plus side, Facebook and Google logins work again.

If anything isn't working, let me know here, please. Thank you for your patience.

When using direct links to forum topics from homepage it is just loading a blank screen, have to navigate through the forum link at the top of the page.

Homepage links, well that was a solid place to start. :)

Looks like the 404 page doesn't work, so that's a bummer.

The checkbox to remain logged in seems to be missing. I even had to log in again within the same browser session, albeit hours later (OS X 10.11 w/Chrome).

First awesome thing I noticed with the new version:

I use the Recent Topics view, and now when I click the unread posts icon to view a topic and then hit "back" , the unread posts icon is greyed out without me having to refresh the page!

There is no more "remember me" checkbox on login. After reading about how it has been used, the truth is that most people deliberately logout if they don't want to be remembered, so I ditched it. You had to login an extra time because I had redeployed. That may happen now and then until it's more stable.