jcgoble3

Well, better late than never, I suppose. If only we had had the ability to tag people back then... Thanks, @VortexBFForever!

Regarding Racer getting RMCed: I've come to the decision that I'd love to see RMC tackle The Racer, but ONLY if the layout is not changed. Shut it down after this season, rip out all of the wooden track and replace it all with the steel Iron Horse track, deconstruct and rebuild supports as needed, give the whole thing a fresh coat of paint, and reopen it in spring of 2019. But leave the layout and the racing aspect alone.

Excellent writing, @VortexBFForever! I wish I had had that level of writing talent when I was your age. Is it too late to welcome you? If not, then welcome to KIC!

It's not the IPB Default theme, as I used that prior to the upgrade and would recognize it if it was.

The major version upgrade triggered a reshuffle of the themes. That specific theme is no longer available. You can check out the new themes by going to the very bottom of the page and clicking "Themes".

Excellent story! Regarding your Beast experience: it was during the offseasons prior to 2011 and 2012 that major retracking was done on The Beast, creating a massively smoother ride. In 2010, when I first rode it, it was extremely rough and I could not stand to ride it in a wheel seat. By 2012, it was running almost like brand new, and the very back seat became my favorite seat, even though it was a wheel seat. So that may explain the difference between your 2009 and 2012 rides. As for my story, here's the condensed version: My mother took me to what was then Paramount's Kings Island about once per year in the early to mid-'90s, but I was too scared to ride much outside of the kiddie land. On my final visit that decade, I decided I wanted to ride The Racer, and my mom tried to talk me out of it, saying that it was much bigger than anything I had ridden before, but I insisted. That ride spooked me so bad that I didn't return to the park until I was an adult. In May 2010, while watching a Reds game on TV, I saw an ad for Kings Island Gold Passes, looked them up online, and decided to give it a try again. I quickly found that like many of my childhood fears, my fear of roller coasters was now gone, and I now enjoyed thrill rides of all kinds. Since 2010, I have been to KI at least three times each year, and have visited other parks as well, including Cedar Point, Holiday World, and Kentucky Kingdom. So yeah, once you realize that you like coasters, there's not really any going back.

Great pictures! Seems like @malem isn't really into the silly pictures; the look on his face in some of these is funny in and of itself!

To expand on that just a little: he talked about needing to "make Mom happy". He then went on to say that in parks away from urban areas, such as Holiday World and Kings Island, Mom often feels comfortable relaxing in a lounge chair and letting the kids go off on their own. But at a park in an urban area, like KK, Mom feels more need to stay with her kids and monitor them. So the park needs to be Mom-friendly and not just targeted at teens, by having plenty of family rides, shade, benches, good landscaping, and so forth.

Looks great! Just a note: it's generally a good idea to post each report in a separate thread rather than one mega-thread if they have lots of photos. Too many photos on one page can cause the page to take a very long time to load, and also can consume massive amounts of data for users viewing on their mobile phones. Posting each report in a new thread ensures that photos from old reports that have expired from the browser cache don't have to be re-downloaded unnecessarily.

I was there. Correct on Enterprise: It was scheduled for removal after the 2016 season, with Eye of the Storm taking its spot. Then in September, they decided to keep it around, forcing EOTS to be moved to another location. Also, Enterprise will only stick around as long as it has no major issues; the first major issue will likely result in its removal. This is due to the fact that replacement parts are difficult to obtain as they must be custom-made to order. Once removed, it will be broken down and sold to other parks for parts. Also, heads-up: Kentucky Kingdom will be announcing both their 2018 and 2019 plans sometime next month. EDIT: And yes, I took lots of photos. They're uploading to Flickr now, and I'll add a link to the album here when the upload finishes. I also plan to do a proper trip report, but that will probably wait until I get some sleep. It's 12:15 AM, I've been up since 5:30 AM yesterday, spent six hours driving (three hours each way), and still have a Formula 1 race to watch before I go to bed. EDIT 2: It's done! Check out my photos here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jcgoble3/sets/72157678434020234

That sounds incredibly awesome!!!! Great job!!

Timberwolf is used for the SpiritSong Christian music festival every June. It is also sometimes used for Music in the Parks awards. Beyond that, I don't think it is used at all.

Great to hear that the work on the organ is continuing! However, when I click on the MP3 file, I get an error message saying, "The page you are trying to access is not available for your account."

Exactly what I thought the other day: using the process of launching a new website as a cover story for hiding testing. Good job, Don.

From the sounds of it, all he has is the VOUCHER for the season pass, not the pass itself. Carowinds might not be capable of scanning a Kings Island pass voucher.

Welcome to KIC! You mean the one in the opening shot of that commercial? It does, but it's most likely just a coincidence. Each one (Bat commercial and MT artwork) were/are both going for "creepy tree", so it's natural to see some similarities, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's intentional. On the other hand, I had never seen that Bat commercial before, so that's a great find! Thanks for sharing it!

Kings Island no doubt already had the idea...

You're asking this question on an amusement park enthusiast site. Of course our answer is yes!

I think it's more likely that it's some combination of: Secrets of the shed being in view of the camera prior to installation inside the shed, or The shed being open to put train cars on the tracks, thereby revealing #whatsintheshed to the camera, or A routine part of preparing the website for the new mobile-friendly design. I strongly suspect that the last of those points is a convenient cover for one of the first two. Keep in mind that they just announced the presence of the train cars 10 days ago. If we assume that they actually arrived the day they were announced (likely, knowing Don), I would think that's a little quick to go from individually wrapped train cars sitting on the ground to full trains on the track testing. But then again, I know almost nothing about the process of beginning testing on a brand new coaster, so I could be completely wrong.

Doesn't matter whether you're talking about photos or not. You're still asking him to reveal secrets that he is not authorized to reveal. If he posts anything at all, even a single word, that gives away or even hints at non-public information, he is very likely to be immediately fired. Multiple reminders to new employees about that have been posted on KIC in the recent days and weeks. So basically, don't ask for anything at all, not even cryptic hints. You won't get them unless somebody wants to get fired, and even if that were to happen, the moderators of this site would delete the post faster than you can say "you're fired".

WindSeeker is a similar story: all of the other WindSeekers have experienced major failures that left riders stranded at the top for hours. Kings Island's WindSeeker has avoided that somehow. Maybe Greg and Don rub each other's heads every morning for luck? I dunno.

The MT Construction Wrap Up thread has been moved to another forum now, but the question of replying to threads in the Kings Island Central News forum remains. A closer look shows that no one has commented in that forum except a moderator since New Year's Eve, so this might be related directly to the IPBoard upgrade from early January rather than anything more recent.

Hmm. It now seems like regular users are no longer able to reply to topics in the "Kings Island Central News" forum. I know it has always been the case that we could not create topics there (since the first post of each thread goes onto the home page of the main site), but not being able to reply to existing ones is something new. On another note, I'm seeing some funkiness with new threads. The "Welcome to KICentral Version 5" thread doesn't show up as the latest post on the forum list; rather, malem's post immediately above from 20 hours ago does. (Obviously this post will overtake the "welcome to version 5" thread, unless there's another bug.) I also had to hard refresh the thread list to force that thread to show up. Also, the new "MT Construction Wrap Up" thread in "Kings Island Central News" shows on the forum list as March 6, but on the thread list and the single post itself, shows as 21 minutes ago.

I wish I had seen this a bit earlier. I just spent several minutes typing a post, and upon submitting it, got a response to a notification query in JSON format. I hit Firefox's back button to recover my post, and discovered I was logged out, and at that point feared I had lost the post. Turns out it did go through, as I found after I logged back in, but it was a bit of a scare. On another note, I notice that I'm seeing lots of "unrecognized character" boxes (example), where previously the character displayed just fine. Is this an issue on my end that can be solved by bypassing/clearing my browser's cache or cookies, or is this something that requires server-side configuration?

Cool! I'll consider preview night, then.