Site Updates & Changes
- Thread starter Gavin
- Start date
Dating back to the pre-ParkFans, BGWFans Forum days, we have always organized "non-Officially Covered" parks on the forum index by their chain (or lack thereof). Though this isn't a particularly "non-Thoosie-friendly" way to approach node organization as many typical park guests have no idea what corporation owns any given park, the reasoning was that, for at least the majority of our audience, it was probably a usable/approachable-enough solution.
About a decade and a half later, that approach has continued to serve us pretty well. I still think it has some pretty notable disadvantages, but without larger, well-defined, geographic regions to cleanly organize parks into (there are too few countries, too many states/provences/etc., and nothing well-known/widely-understood enough inbetween to make a non-nightmare-ish park listing from), I think it's still the best option I know of.
That said, a byproduct of this structure was that we proliferated discussion nodes for countless international parks that were part of these chains simply because we did not know where to draw the line. We probably don't need a node dedicated Italy's Gardaland here on ParkFans, but it's a Merlin park and since a Merlin parks board wouldn't be reasonable without including iconic Merlin properties like Alton Towers, where were we to draw the line? Back then we decided to take a maximalist approach and simply create boards for everything.
Completely unsurprisingly, this lead to a bevy of entirely unused discussion nodes that, frankly, just made it harder for users to find the parks they were actually likely to want to talk about. Additionally, this massive node proliferation resulted in a lot of neglect as, frankly, I'm not tracking the current ownership situation, operating status, etc of some of the tremendously minor, international properties for which nodes had been made. Because of this, the structure regularly resulted in outdated or just downright wrong information being conveyed.
Anyway, with these and other concerns in mind, over the last couple of years we have been slowly trimming down many of the (often completely unused) nodes dedicated to smaller, non-North American parks. Many of these removals have likely gone completely unnoticed as, again, many were for minor parks from well outside of our typical reader's "territory."
So why does all of this matter now? Over the last week or two, we finally took this trimming to its long-intended endpoint by basically cutting down the problem-causing tree entirely. The "Other Parks" category containing parks organized by chain is now a "North American Parks" category of parks organized by chains present in North America. All Non-North American park nodes in this structure have been abolished.
The discussions that had taken place in previous nodes dedicated to non-North American parks have all been combined into centralized threads dedicated to each park and organized by Continent in the new "Extracontinental Parks" category. Furthermore, all of these park threads have been tagged with the countries in which the parks are located making searching or filtering through the listing to find the non-North American park(s) discussions you're looking for easier than ever.
We typically try to avoid centralized, broad-topic threads here at ParkFans but, given the volume and diversity of discussion we anticipate taking (and ever has taken) place here on ParkFans regarding parks outside of North America, a single, unified-thread approach to these discussions in particular seems reasonable for our purposes. We also have long-term plans to mitigate the information accessibility issues imposed by long, winding threads more broadly—but that is a major update that is still a ways off.
An unfortunate, current downside to this centralized approach to infrequently-discussed parks though is the way it interacts with our index of current and/or upcoming park additions. Previously a new thread would be created for each project but now those discussions will take place in a centralized park thread. For now, our goal is to stylize non-North American parks with currently relevant projects as "[Park Name] — Project [Year]: [Name/Brief Description]" so they'll still be represented in the project index. There is a long-term plan to overhaul the project index portion of the system entirely which will erase this issue eventually, but, as a stopgap, we will be using the approach above for now. As always, if you ever see a thread you believe is mislabeled or should have a title adjustment made (like adding a project addendum to these non-North American park threads) let us know!
Looking forward, this is a test run for possible/likely future changes to the way we handle small, especially non-chain, North American theme/amusement parks and FECs as well. Currently what is now the "Other North American Parks" node is a complete and utter disaster—an unholy amalgamation of park threads, project threads, news threads, and more all jammed into a junk drawer of discussions about many parks that, due to reasonably expected discussion volume, are unlikely to ever justify their own nodes. Anyway, we'll observe how you all interact with this more centralized structure for non-North American parks and decide how/if to proceed to the Other North American Parks board at a later date.
Though not directly related, in the year ahead we will also, unfortunately, need to work out how to handle a fairly-heavily-discussed park with a dedicated node going extinct. Our current structure doesn't really have a solution for defunct parks broadly which, for park history fans, is probably an independent issue more broadly. Similarly, we don't have a good solution right now for discussions regarding proposed parks or a policy for when an in-development park should get its own thread or node. Hell, we don't even have a line in the sand for when North American parks get their own nodes—graduating out of that terrifying "Other North American Parks" node hellscape. Lots to solve in the months and years ahead!
Definitely always interested in any opinions you all may have regarding organizational changes or issues like this. Let us know if you have any thoughts!
Lastly, if you see any duplicative, mislabeled, or unlabeled threads in the new nodes, give us a shout so we can fix it!
About a decade and a half later, that approach has continued to serve us pretty well. I still think it has some pretty notable disadvantages, but without larger, well-defined, geographic regions to cleanly organize parks into (there are too few countries, too many states/provences/etc., and nothing well-known/widely-understood enough inbetween to make a non-nightmare-ish park listing from), I think it's still the best option I know of.
That said, a byproduct of this structure was that we proliferated discussion nodes for countless international parks that were part of these chains simply because we did not know where to draw the line. We probably don't need a node dedicated Italy's Gardaland here on ParkFans, but it's a Merlin park and since a Merlin parks board wouldn't be reasonable without including iconic Merlin properties like Alton Towers, where were we to draw the line? Back then we decided to take a maximalist approach and simply create boards for everything.
Completely unsurprisingly, this lead to a bevy of entirely unused discussion nodes that, frankly, just made it harder for users to find the parks they were actually likely to want to talk about. Additionally, this massive node proliferation resulted in a lot of neglect as, frankly, I'm not tracking the current ownership situation, operating status, etc of some of the tremendously minor, international properties for which nodes had been made. Because of this, the structure regularly resulted in outdated or just downright wrong information being conveyed.
Anyway, with these and other concerns in mind, over the last couple of years we have been slowly trimming down many of the (often completely unused) nodes dedicated to smaller, non-North American parks. Many of these removals have likely gone completely unnoticed as, again, many were for minor parks from well outside of our typical reader's "territory."
So why does all of this matter now? Over the last week or two, we finally took this trimming to its long-intended endpoint by basically cutting down the problem-causing tree entirely. The "Other Parks" category containing parks organized by chain is now a "North American Parks" category of parks organized by chains present in North America. All Non-North American park nodes in this structure have been abolished.
The discussions that had taken place in previous nodes dedicated to non-North American parks have all been combined into centralized threads dedicated to each park and organized by Continent in the new "Extracontinental Parks" category. Furthermore, all of these park threads have been tagged with the countries in which the parks are located making searching or filtering through the listing to find the non-North American park(s) discussions you're looking for easier than ever.
We typically try to avoid centralized, broad-topic threads here at ParkFans but, given the volume and diversity of discussion we anticipate taking (and ever has taken) place here on ParkFans regarding parks outside of North America, a single, unified-thread approach to these discussions in particular seems reasonable for our purposes. We also have long-term plans to mitigate the information accessibility issues imposed by long, winding threads more broadly—but that is a major update that is still a ways off.
An unfortunate, current downside to this centralized approach to infrequently-discussed parks though is the way it interacts with our index of current and/or upcoming park additions. Previously a new thread would be created for each project but now those discussions will take place in a centralized park thread. For now, our goal is to stylize non-North American parks with currently relevant projects as "[Park Name] — Project [Year]: [Name/Brief Description]" so they'll still be represented in the project index. There is a long-term plan to overhaul the project index portion of the system entirely which will erase this issue eventually, but, as a stopgap, we will be using the approach above for now. As always, if you ever see a thread you believe is mislabeled or should have a title adjustment made (like adding a project addendum to these non-North American park threads) let us know!
Looking forward, this is a test run for possible/likely future changes to the way we handle small, especially non-chain, North American theme/amusement parks and FECs as well. Currently what is now the "Other North American Parks" node is a complete and utter disaster—an unholy amalgamation of park threads, project threads, news threads, and more all jammed into a junk drawer of discussions about many parks that, due to reasonably expected discussion volume, are unlikely to ever justify their own nodes. Anyway, we'll observe how you all interact with this more centralized structure for non-North American parks and decide how/if to proceed to the Other North American Parks board at a later date.
Though not directly related, in the year ahead we will also, unfortunately, need to work out how to handle a fairly-heavily-discussed park with a dedicated node going extinct. Our current structure doesn't really have a solution for defunct parks broadly which, for park history fans, is probably an independent issue more broadly. Similarly, we don't have a good solution right now for discussions regarding proposed parks or a policy for when an in-development park should get its own thread or node. Hell, we don't even have a line in the sand for when North American parks get their own nodes—graduating out of that terrifying "Other North American Parks" node hellscape. Lots to solve in the months and years ahead!
Definitely always interested in any opinions you all may have regarding organizational changes or issues like this. Let us know if you have any thoughts!
Lastly, if you see any duplicative, mislabeled, or unlabeled threads in the new nodes, give us a shout so we can fix it!
Last edited:
Across the forum in areas with combined thread listings (listings of threads from a variety of nodes such as "What's New"), each threads' parent node is now displayed as an additional prefix alongside any actual node subcategory thread prefixes. A photo of this in action can be found below.
Both the new parent node prefixes and now also the node subcategory prefixes act as links to their associated thread listings. You can think of these like breadcrumbs—clicking the node title prefix will take you to the node, clicking the thread category prefix will take you to the node with that thread category prefix filter applied, and clicking on the thread title will, of course, take you to the specific thread.
There are a number of goals behind this change—some to fix current problems and some to set us up for the future. In the immediate term, this alternation should remove a lot of ambiguity from thread titles and prevent the need to expressly spell out what park a thread is associated with in the thread title itself. This is easy to highlight above as now threads like the Legoland Florida Project 2026: Galacticoaster thread can now simply be named "Project 2026: Galacticoaster" rather than the far more verbose, previous title. You'll see the shorter title when specifically browsing the Legoland Florida node, but anywhere context isn't clear, the forum will display the associated park name as a prefix. Another example where this will help is special event threads where the same branding is used across multiple parks (Howl-O-Scream for instance).
There are some nodes that will still need tweaking to make this display universally sensible, but I want to specifically address two of the biggest outliers: the Busch Gardens Williamsburg and Kings Dominion areas. As I've alluded to before, the endgame is to collapse both of those sprawling mazes of nodes, subnodes, and sub-subnodes into the same, flat, single-level, intuitively sortable and filterable park specific thread listings we're attempting to implement and standardize across the entire board. That said, due to the sprawling size and immense volume of content contained within those boards, we are going to continue putting off that radical change until we're sure we have the structures and systems in place to provide the best experience we can on the other end. Currently, there's still a lot of work to do.
For now, all BGW and KD-related subnodes have been retained—they've simply had the specific parks' abbreviation affixed to the existing subnode names. In mixed thread settings, they'll appear like this:
It is inconsistent and yes, I hate that too, but for now, it's the right call.
In other news, the work addressed in the previous update has continued with the trimming of a few additional unused nodes. There will certainly still be more to come on that front as well. I anticipate the wrecking ball will be heading for the "Other North American Parks" junk drawer soon with a very significant restructuring to bring it inline with the Extracontinental Parks board changes that were implemented over the summer.
Lastly, as the need to work out a final home for Six Flags America and Marineland content becomes an increasingly immediate need, you will likely see a "Nonexistent Parks" category or similar added soon. This will offer an opportunity to better track all of those often-doomed-from-the-start proposed new park developments in a potential "Proposed Parks" node as well.
Anyway, that's all I have for now. If you spot any issues, let us know!
Both the new parent node prefixes and now also the node subcategory prefixes act as links to their associated thread listings. You can think of these like breadcrumbs—clicking the node title prefix will take you to the node, clicking the thread category prefix will take you to the node with that thread category prefix filter applied, and clicking on the thread title will, of course, take you to the specific thread.
There are a number of goals behind this change—some to fix current problems and some to set us up for the future. In the immediate term, this alternation should remove a lot of ambiguity from thread titles and prevent the need to expressly spell out what park a thread is associated with in the thread title itself. This is easy to highlight above as now threads like the Legoland Florida Project 2026: Galacticoaster thread can now simply be named "Project 2026: Galacticoaster" rather than the far more verbose, previous title. You'll see the shorter title when specifically browsing the Legoland Florida node, but anywhere context isn't clear, the forum will display the associated park name as a prefix. Another example where this will help is special event threads where the same branding is used across multiple parks (Howl-O-Scream for instance).
There are some nodes that will still need tweaking to make this display universally sensible, but I want to specifically address two of the biggest outliers: the Busch Gardens Williamsburg and Kings Dominion areas. As I've alluded to before, the endgame is to collapse both of those sprawling mazes of nodes, subnodes, and sub-subnodes into the same, flat, single-level, intuitively sortable and filterable park specific thread listings we're attempting to implement and standardize across the entire board. That said, due to the sprawling size and immense volume of content contained within those boards, we are going to continue putting off that radical change until we're sure we have the structures and systems in place to provide the best experience we can on the other end. Currently, there's still a lot of work to do.
For now, all BGW and KD-related subnodes have been retained—they've simply had the specific parks' abbreviation affixed to the existing subnode names. In mixed thread settings, they'll appear like this:
It is inconsistent and yes, I hate that too, but for now, it's the right call.
In other news, the work addressed in the previous update has continued with the trimming of a few additional unused nodes. There will certainly still be more to come on that front as well. I anticipate the wrecking ball will be heading for the "Other North American Parks" junk drawer soon with a very significant restructuring to bring it inline with the Extracontinental Parks board changes that were implemented over the summer.
Lastly, as the need to work out a final home for Six Flags America and Marineland content becomes an increasingly immediate need, you will likely see a "Nonexistent Parks" category or similar added soon. This will offer an opportunity to better track all of those often-doomed-from-the-start proposed new park developments in a potential "Proposed Parks" node as well.
Anyway, that's all I have for now. If you spot any issues, let us know!
KING!!!
Absolutely fantastic. Carowinds Connection contains a lot of history about the park, those photos being available online again is so great.
Grateful for you and PFN for hosting the site half a decade later. Thank you!
Killed the project 2025 thread search node on the frontpage, renamed and cleaned up most every thread that was previously in it, cleaned up all the threads in the 2026 listing, and I added a 2027 projects listing in addition to polishing up all of the threads now found within it.
If you see anything missing, misclassified, etc, give me a shout!
If you see anything missing, misclassified, etc, give me a shout!