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Forums have unfortunately died away a bit. The rise of social media is a big part of that. And then with Discords, Slacks, Twitches and whatever else (I feel like an old man talking about that as I have no clue on these things properly), it just adds. The idea of signing up for one specific website to discuss one specific topic is just foreign now. Thorpe-specific as well, it's no coincidence that here at TPM the forums dropped off during a time when investment in the park was at rock bottom. We went from coasters every 3 years, and new attractions yearly, to bouncy castles and mazes being the 'big new things'. And yeah, theme park enthusiasm has changed dramatically. 10 years ago, it focused a lot on "trying" to find out whatever you could, but deep down knowing you would just get the odd glimpse here and there. You might hear from / know someone who legitimately knows something, and you got a kick out of knowing it. But it was all a lot more 'wait and see'. Now, influencer culture more broadly means people have quite literally been able to turn their hobbies into a career of sorts. It's their job to find out the information, be that camping out for days on end, working alongside the parks or what have you. It feels a lot more stifled. This point really resonated with me @Inferno We're currently experiencing a double-edged sword of information. Getting 'behind the curtain' is so much easier now, be that through press nights, VIP BTSs, park open-ness, etc. But sometimes a bit of ignorance can be bliss too, or that more scattergun approach feels more natural. Seeing behind the curtain is very controlled, parks will naturally sweep the dirt under the rug before they do that (literally, in some cases). There was something much more exciting about just catching glimpses here and there in a more uncontrolled way. At the same time, just reading your Face it Alone review from Studio 13, it made me go "Damn, I wish we had a POV of it. I would love to remember how it looked during that middle third which is such a blur". Even if we know that a press night POV would be over-egged, it would still be good to see (okay, there wasn't a 'press night' in the way we're used to describing that for FN14, but you know what I mean). We're really in a golden age of being able to document and archive stuff, which I think is positive. Going back to a more TPM-focus now, I've literally spent more than half my life as a member on this forum. I've made life-long friendships here. At one point, I house-shared with a couple of people I met through TPM. Whilst that's stuff that could happen on Twitter / Discord / Whatever, it just felt much more natural here. I always feel like these days I could contribute more to the forums, but as Benin says, growing up means forums slowly subside in the priority list. With TPM, we keep the socials active. The forums and the website have suffered. The main website in particular; backend-wise, it's ancient, and those problems have crept into the look of the website (you can't actually read any news article at the moment, lol whoops). We're looking at fixing that over summer though... We intend to keep the forums running. We're probably long removed from the days of running meets. But we never ran paid-for meets/events (even when we got ERTs, BTSs, etc), and don't intend to go down that way. TPM is just a couple of people who like Thorpe and like sharing that enthusiasm with others, through both sharing updates and discussing things. Don't want to make it a career or anything. We've never gone down the Youtube/vlogging route, simply because we don't want to talk in front of a camera. We're not changing who we are, even if that means we're becoming a bit of relic to enthusiasm of yesteryear. Anyway, that was very tangential to this and rambling and hijacking of the topic at hand. The whole theme park enthusiasm has changed, some of it for the better, some for the worse. I guess the good thing is you can still make of it what you want. It's just a shame it's harder to keep it 'as it was', if you will, when the rest of it has changed around you.

I think with the expansion of Facebook and then Discord the groups on forums just migrated to those places. Being able to make posting footage of things a job also has made a massive contribution to the way the media of it all is consumed and distributed. How many construction updates were just someone taking photos on a random visit rather than being camped out for days on end or a 30 minute video with an asinine presenter and a click bait title? Also many who used them in the "heyday" have grown up, gotten jobs and lives that take precedent over forum times. I will say though some things do irk me about modern enthusiasts. Which isn't solely a theme park based issue. The almost cult-like following of certain "influencers" where their word is law, the way in which everything must be amazing or terrible with zero nuance to things. On the other hand, I do think some places had some very unwelcoming "veterans" and often internal politics/cliques/issues that did not help matters for newcomers or regulars. As mentioned though, this is not an issue solely in this hobby. There's a lot of forums I used to frequent which are very dead, even with there being constant new stuff happening. Discord is king now I feel of the old forum life.

Great write up, I remember frequently reading many of the park forums back in the day, before deciding to join up myself. it does feel strange how different the theme park enthusiast world now is. Definitely more controlled and refine to say the least. Not to mention many of the additional park sites have closed and disappeared now also. Times do change.

As I intimated, my other main hobby is Aviation and luckily recently I combined a trip to Seattle with Toronto, and as we have discussed, things change; very few aircraft collections/museums now provide guides and likewise with theme parks. I was aware of fellow coaster enthusiasts who used to collect those guide/plans and for them, a major part of our hobby has gone. The comment from these establishments is "it's online".