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Right now our Forum etiquette page includes a request for captions for photos, but there is no rule or technical fix.

parkfans.net

Forum Etiquette

It was decided by the Advisory Panel that the old "Forum Etiquette" section of the forum rules should be removed as they were not enforced standards but rather encouraged guidelines of conversation. I firmly believe that new users (especially those unfamiliar with internet fora) who are...
parkfans.net parkfans.net
 
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Would there be a way to add the ability to send picture in PMs? I was trying to send something to someone that I didn't fee; In should share publicly at this time and couldn't find away to add it as an attachment.
 
horsesboy said:
Would there be a way to add the ability to send picture in PMs? I was trying to send something to someone that I didn't fee; In should share publicly at this time and couldn't find away to add it as an attachment.
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We've previously not allowed attachments over direct messages in an effort to keep attachment bulk down as much as possible. While attachments on the main boards equate to public content for everyone that could be useful to many folks for years to come, content shared via private conversations is often a one-and-done situation for the people involved. Hence, having to keep hosting such content represents essentially no community benefit.

We're looking into possibly allowing attachments in private conversations for active donors though—likely with some sort of warning that every so often private message attachments may be wiped to preserve storage capacity.
 
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horsesboy said:
Would there be a way to add the ability to send picture in PMs? I was trying to send something to someone that I didn't fee; In should share publicly at this time and couldn't find away to add it as an attachment.
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A work around for this is if you have cloud storage account (many free ones out there) you can put the picture or whatever it is on that site and then generate a download link and just send the intended person the download link in the PM.
 
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Alf33 said:
A work around for this is if you have cloud storage account (many free ones out there) you can put the picture or whatever it is on that site and then generate a download link and just send the intended person the download link in the PM.
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Imgur is dead simple for this and includes the ability to make the URL private and not public
 
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This update causing me a headache lol How do I go back to forum page without scrolling back to the top of a thread on mobile? Looks very sleek btw thank y’all for keeping the site updated
 
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The current theme is just the old one but very broken. @Zachary is working on a new theme that will be fixed, it’s just going to take some time. You can always swipe to go back to the last page or use the arrow in the footer.
 
It would be kinda cool to have a thread table of contents.

For example, looking back at Invadr (project 2017), it would be really cool to see how people's opinions and theories changed after, say, the second marketing video was released. As it stands right now, I have to comb through 99 pages to see how the community responded. Indexing everything would be cool so that I would know to navigate exactly to page X to get the community's reaction.

It would also be cool to quickly get up to speed on upcoming projects. I know the official blog posts do a good job of this, but a document giving a quick recap would be awesome so a new user doesn't have to slog through page after page of theories that became obsolete.
 
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It's certainly an issue we've thought about. For threads with wiki sections, any user can go and start building one already if they want to. I had been maintaining the Major Updates section in the wiki for the DarKoaster thread, but I haven't added to it in a bit. If there's something anyone out there thinks should be added, by all means, go right ahead! Hopefully the effort renders that thread far more useful for folks who stumble upon it long into the future.

It's my intention to continue to wiki-ify all major project threads moving forward, but going through and manually indexing older threads after the fact sounds like a really daunting task. In my case, I'd rather put that effort into building out/updating more wiki pages for park attractions, events, etc.

That said, if someone else has a particular interest in building out an index of some of the older project mega-threads, I'm happy to wiki-ify spesific, older project threads so people have a place to do so.

This applies to any thread really. If someone is feeling particularly inspired to write an index of a big thread or wiki page for an attraction that doesn't have one yet, just let us know and we can get whatever thread you're interested in wiki-ified.
 
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I am heading to my home park when I was growing up next Saturday, Marriott's Great America. I know it's Six Flags now, but nevertheless, I found this awesome resource related to math and science days the park is holding this month - https://static.sixflags.com/website/files/sfgm_physics-day-teacher-workbook.pdf

The ride stats themselves can be found on RCDB, but there is a lot of other cool information here, such as what happens when you enter the tunnel on Raging Bull. Any chance ParkFans could compile similar resources somewhere?
 
I think you guys should look into some changes to the search bar, it may just be me, but I feel like it almost never works.

Half the time when I search for something someone said before, or a thread title, it says that a word is too short, and that seems to break the entire search. For example, if I search the phrase "Howl-O-Scream," no results are found because "O" is too short and breaks the entire search. Same thing if I search for "Volcano: The Blast Coaster." "The" is too short and breaks the entire search, giving me 0 results.

I think you guys should look into adopting a search bar similar to the one Discord uses. It allows you to only search messages sent before, after, or on a specific date. You can search only a specific thread and from a specific member, etc... It also doesn't have that "word is too short" message, which I think is the biggest issue with the one you guys currently have.
 
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In response to Zachary’s note on BGW’s Loch Ness Monster manufacturer predictions, consider a spreadsheet-style list that includes the original poster, their claimed info, and whether it was true or not. Then you could add their prediction accuracy to their profile somehow?
 
nick said:
If the forum doesn’t already have a birthday tracker, “announcement thing,” for animals, key staff, rides, parks, etc., it should!
Maybe a banner on the front page?
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Unfortunately, park-specific initiatives like that would be out of place as a forum-wide thing for ParkFans. I like the idea though (especially since it could largely be an evergreen, set-and-forget, type of thing. I've started building a Google Calendar and the ability to embed it into a thread. When I'm happy enough with it, I'll start a thread for it so it will always be around for people to reference (and so people can discuss details and/or contribute additions).

nick said:
In response to Zachary’s note on BGW’s Loch Ness Monster manufacturer predictions, consider a spreadsheet-style list that includes the original poster, their claimed info, and whether it was true or not. Then you could add their prediction accuracy to their profile somehow?
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I feel like it would be a potentially drama and conflict-filled minefield for a forum admin to take on a project like that publicly.

There's certainly no rule against publicly tracking factual claims or even just rumors posted by other users, influencers, outlets, etc and assessing them against the eventually provable truth. It would be a big project that wouldn't return results for months or even years, but I'd be very interested in watching such an initiative if someone else felt super passionate about taking it on.
 
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"Reliability ratings", the inevitable suggestion for all online communities. It starts to point you in a direction of never questioning some people and always questioning others, basically officially sets a hierarchy of people in the community. Generally, I recommend staying away from it, since starting to grant merit to a documented hierarchy beyond what already exists is usually a bad thing. As an example and not campaigning against admin tags or AP tags, but all across online anyone with an "Admin" tag is automatically seen as more credible and more trustworthy than everyone else. Which generally can be true (especially here, Zach is never ever wrong), but it starts to get into the area of 90% of the time the general populous will side with the ones with the tags in a disagreement. This usually isn't a problem with admin tags, I think the benefits of admin tags outweigh the negatives, but that scale starts to tip the other way when you start to granularly weigh the individual people against each other.

TL;DR I get the value of the idea, but it is a slippery slope of basically ranking members, since personal opinion will almost always gets conflated.

This is oddly something I am kinda passionate about, as I have seen communities go to shit going down this path. A good alternative is attributing accuracy to the information and not the person, a tag for a post that has been verified and confirmed, like a "Gold Star". But not then counting people's Gold Stars against each other.
 
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Yeah, I'm very against notating one's track record on their account. People mature and change. I wouldn't want someone's past mistakes or poor judgement distilled down to a number and then for said number to follow them forever in some widely visible, accessible format.

That said, it would be fascinating to be able to look back through the history of the rumor cycle on a specific project, event, offering, or whatever else and see who made good calls and who made bad ones. Doing that without it devolving into conflict and chaos could be an insurmountable challenge though.
 
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