Sheepie

I've not read your TR yet, but I had a skim through..DAYYUMMM you took some awesome photos. Wow!EDIT:Really enjoyed your TR, that's definitely a lot of riding you did! Usually I find Thorpe underwhelming if I feel like I've done everything loads of times in one day, I know that doesn't make sense, but it makes me feel as though there isn't much to do.The same happens with Chessington when it's very quiet. Although there you have the option of the zoo.If you work out what it is or have other trips then let us know; a very enjoyable read!

That Bobsled looks epic Benin! They have taken the basic indoor concept of Saw, but then took it to the next level. Brilliant. ^_^Interesting on Dollywood's Wingrider. If that Coasterfusion article is true, it'll make it the biggest Wingrider in the world. Not that Dollywood ever do things by halves!

What's the exact problem Phill? Is it just not appearing on profiles or are you getting some kind of error message?

As I've said, I won't be able to make this meet unfortunately due to prior commitments and the expensive travel for me to get to Legoland.I hope everyone has a fantastic time and I hope you all look after yourselves and make this meet another success!

Hi guys,So I think it's about time we brought all of our members up to speed with things with what our aims are for our forum community.Members of The Team spent the majority of yesterday (I was up for over 30 hours working on stuff) brainstorming ideas and going through member suggestions and feedback, to decide on a potential plan as to how we can bring the community forward and into the future.Firstly, let me just say that we plan to experiment with lots of different things over the coming weeks and depending on feedback, we will listen and see what's best for everyone. That's an important point I feel, "best for everyone", ie- not what pleases four or five people. You can't please everyone, it's impossible, but having something that pleases the majority is a good middle ground.I may as well tackle the Chat Room situation first. Let me shed some light into what happened last night. Since the Chat Room was introduced, we have received an unbelievable amount of complaints from other members, parents, Merlin representatives and the parks themselves.The truth is, Chat, in its current form cannot continue forever. Things need to change. If we don't change, then this could lead to much, much more serious implications for our community. Considering the amount of members we have on here that actually work for Merlin as well, I'd like you to think what implications this could have on their jobs.Last night, we took the decision to take the feature offline, whilst all the moderating team discussed possibilities, not only for the chat room, but for other areas of the forum too. Like I mentioned, this is not a decision we're taking lightly, it's being forced upon us and we have no choice. At the moment, a manageable moderating structure does not exist for the chat room, so that is something that we need to implement before we can continue with our Chat Room and unfortunately, some possibly unpopular rules may need to be put in place.To work around this, these are some ideas that we have discussed, but not implemented as of yet....My idea was to make chat into a weekly/ bi- weekly event where on our selected days, we have topics of discussion which give people a purpose to be there and discuss something. This would solve the problem of members lingering around in there and then eventually, some kind of drama unfolds and this is a major source of complaints of the chat room. There are lots of members that would love to be involved in the chat room, but we have received complaints about comments made and the constant spammy arguments that occur in there. Not our view- but the views of our members.We have to agree on what our Chat Room is actually providing for everyone. Right now, it is a glorified messenger service in which offers nothing else to our community that other social networking sites don't offer. I feel there needs to be something worthwhile to having a Chat Room, so having discussion topics could be one solution.The idea of how it would work would be a chosen subject, sometimes park related, sometimes other topical points, therefore, if you'd like to participate then you can, but if not, then don't. This is not to say that once conversation has run dry, that we can't then have a general conversation with each other. The topical discussion points are to help members feel included in the discussion and not just a new member talking to a group of established members.Other solutions would be to only have the chat available when an Admin/ Mod is available and bringing in a watershed for younger members or having a minimum post count to enter the chat. I've obviously outlined my personal solution in more detail but note that none of these solutions will be experimented with until we have a proper moderation system installed.We have listened to various points about our moderating style on the forums and trust me when I tell you that they have all been taken on board. I'll tell you my personal view, which is that we should allow more leeway in all sections of the forum in terms of freedom of discussion for our members and I think we have been overly strict at times. However, we will all need to decide on a compromise so that our moderators are happy and also one that our members can cope with, with clear rules and guidelines of what is what isn't acceptable on the forums.As we have listened, we're in the works of setting up a banter section our on forums due to concerns that the fun and jokes were being lost from discussion. It's not my personal preference- I would much rather we had it running throughout the forums, within reason, but it was a suggestion made by our members and the team are willing to experiment with it. So expect that to appear in the coming weeks.We discussed our meets. We have only just begun to shake off the bad reputation that our meets received from 2009/ start of 2010, this we're really pleased with and on the whole, everyone seems to enjoy our meets and we would love to keep growing the scale of our community meets and offer for trips for people. We hope you enjoy them as much as we all do.Now, let me touch on some of the changes planned to the Mania Hub site. Again, nothing is set in stone but these are some of the changes you can expect:Maniahub.com main page- we have removed the coming soon banners for our planned sister sites. At this current moment in time, we shall not continue development on these sites. We would like to perfect what we do have before we make the choice to expand. Basically, we want to offer you quality over quantity.Now, we know the page looks strange now but bear in mind this is only temporary whilst we go about changing and improving the Mania Hub page itself. It won't stay that way forever and we realise it's not a very appealing first image for our site guests.Let me tell you some other planned updates for the main page. We're working on re-instating our team blog; we've got various ideas and we want to make it more interactive and want to possibly include members and also discuss site news, meet ups and basically make it much more personal for our members and the team itself.Other than that, we just want to make sure that everything is correct and up to date and is still relevant to our aims for the site and community. We want to lean the forums to a more industry wide forum which I feel reflects the trend of discussions on the forum. Indeed, some of our best topics are the industry wide ones such as "Other Attractions and Park News". More emphasis shall be made on us being Mania Hub rather than solely TPM. We're going to remain faithful to our roots though, we still have a lot of members who love Thorpe and will continue to discuss it on our forums.I'll leave you with a final thought. Please accept that we work on this site for you. We have no personal agendas. You all know, we don't get paid and it's a thankless job. We accept this and we realise that we have to be prepared to accept all feedback and take it on board, it'd be ignorant not to. I hope that this post demonstrates that we are listening and we have taken things that members have said on board. We love you guys and without you, there'd be no purpose for this community. We're all old and new friends and are here for very similar reasons, please keep that at the back of your mind whilst enjoying the community and know that we are always working hard to improve things for everyone.Take care guys,Sheepie and the Mania Hub Team.

I have succumbed to the Twitter craze. I'm slightly addicted to following people!

I have to admit, it's looking more official by the minute, these Facebook groups! I hope for you guys that it is! Exciting.But annoying?

You would have loved it Phill! It was such a magical ride and everything that IS good about Duel today is mostly what was there before the re-theme. I miss the old finale scene so much!

I'm late to the party, but... Joseph Kahn! He's my faveourite video director out there. I always love his videos, to me, Kahn is like the Steven Moffat of the music video world.Here are a few others he's directed for those interested.... Sorry for the blatent Kelly whoring, love those music videos though!Joseph also had a dispute with RCA over a particular scene in Kelly's Already Gone music video. The rumour is that Kelly and Joseph wrote an ending that suggested a suicide/ death but RCA threw a hissy fit and didn't approve the scene. The video then had to be edited, which is why the video ends so abruptly! There are little hints throughout the video that suggest a death as well so I think this rumour is true.Once again, sorry for Kelly whoring, but I love Joseph Kahn and wanted to demonstrate that Glory was not the first project he'd had troubles with.

In an ideal world, the perfect theme park attraction would have a large throughput, lots of queueline themeing and ride interaction, as well as being a thumping good ride at the end of it. The only exception to ride interaction is when you have a queue that is so in your face with story, not being able to see the ride doesn't matter.Just as a quick aside- I'm going to use some pictures from Google to aid my post, none of them are mine and are just used for demonstration purposes. ^_^So, these rides then...Tomb Blaster: With all 5 trains running at full capacity, I do not mind queueing for this ride. It's a very pleasant queue which unfortunately is sometimes let down by the hectic merge point. More often than not there are cars locked down and out of use which severely reduces the hourly capacity of the ride and is extremely frustrating for guests. The ride is capable of reaching throughputs exceeding 1000 guests an hour, however with the large amount of exit riders and fastrackers this ride receives, this severely eats into the stand-by queue.To top it off, after queueing for such a long time, the ride isn't that great at the end of it and I am left feeling rather underwhelmed at why I had spent such a long time queueing for a ride that was just not worth the wait.Air: Tranquil, smooth and sedated. Air's light blue colour scheme and landscaping put many riders at ease and looks less foreboding than many of the other large attractions at Alton Towers. The soundtrack also reflects the cool, calm feel of the area with a motif that wouldn't be out of place on a Relaxation CD. Air has a reasonably large throughput, has a reasonable amount of ride interaction. I don't mind queueing for Air, but at the same time, I wouldn't queue in excess of an hour for the ride. Air is a difficult one and I don't really know what else to say about it. I suppose with Air, I feel like I am queueing for an experience, whereas my favourite attractions involve queuing as part of the experience. The queue does not move quite fast enough to be forgiven for this and whilst the ride is very good, I don't come off on that massive high like on other attractions.Detonator:Det is essentially a cattle-pen that ends in a gallery-like fashion around the ride platform. I don't mind queueing around the ride platform, so what, 15-20 minutes? Any longer, and I don't feel as though it's worth it. It's a good drop tower but the length of these type of rides makes me feel very bitter about queueing for them.Everest: I'll try to keep this as brief as possible. As far as I'm concerned, this is not a queue, this is part of the attraction. Not queueing for the coaster is like skipping to the Vault section of Hex. It's quick, it's stunningly detailed and it literally throws you into a bubble so much I found myself oddly forgetting that I was in line for a roller-coaster. There are hints of what is to come with parts of the queue parading by the stunning drop out of the mountain. Honestly, I could queue for the entire length of Everest's queue and then out into the fictional village itself. My only gripe was the little room before the loading platform, where I got stuck in for 10 minutes, so had to listen to the safety spiel at least 10 times, that was frustrating. The overall experience is just so good though, I soon forgot about that little mishap. Brilliant line for a brilliant ride.Dragon Falls:It's pleasant, it moves fast. I don't mind queueing up to 45 minutes for this flume. The queue is helped by lots of shade, a pleasant soundtrack and just a very nicely landscaped area. It's relatively unremarkable really, but the ride's length and laid- back, relaxed tone along with the quick moving queue, it all seems to balance itself out nicely. .

Fair play to artists if they like the whole fashion/ persona/ attitude/ theatre of it all. Hard work to keep up with it all!You know though, it does get exhausting now and then, I'd like to see more artists that get up on stage and sing their butt off, no added frills or fireworks... it takes a lot of talent and true stage presence to hold an audience with just your voice.This is not aimed at anyone particular in the industry, just a general trend of comment really!

The heart-in-mouth moment when your best friend replaces you/ says they'll never do something again but then does it with someone else.Win!

Mer, I'm sorry but the phrase, "mild mania" made me LOL rather hard! This is what you get when you become a moderator on ManiaHub. ^_^I get what you're saying though. I don't personally need to drink to have a good time but at times when I'm feeling self conscious in a large group of people, one or two drinks can ease the shyness.I'll tell you all a secret, I'm a very shy person and very insecure- I'm very good at pretending though so hence at meets and stuff I'm very rawr! I hope that made sense!

Seven weeks, to this very moment, I will be in Orlando.*Screams!*

Europa are really swinging for the fences lately aren't they. What a proud day to be a Europa Park fan.They will no doubt be rewarded for their investment into such quality rides!

Loved your trip reports Benin. I must say, I don't think I'll be visiting both parks any time soon, at least not until both make some modifications. That's not to say that they're bad parks, but there are other parks I'd rather go to over these right now.Love Europe though.

Haha! I have a friend like that. Remind him why he's really there (ie- spending time with you) and that should guilt-trip into just getting on with queueing... and you know, you might have to..... TALK to each other!

It's nice to see your dad making the effort! :lol:Eh Daniel9?

More fool me smiffy? Mate it was a fantastic queue. Great atmosphere, excellent themeing, everyone singing- a long to the music, spectacular effects that literally made people go "whoah" in the queue.The best queueing experience of my life that only Expedition Everest came near.

It depends on when you want to go dude. I always use London Midland to book Alton Towers Travel and they're usually fantastic. I've found ticket options for £22 return on London Midland for Saturday 16th July... which was just a random date that I'd typed in. Here are the details:Departing London Euston @ 07:20 (Virgin Trains to Manchester Piccadilly)Arriving Stoke on Trent @ 08:48.This is a £11 single ticket.Then on the way home, the same day.Departing Stoke on Trent @ 18:12Arriving London Euston @ 19:42.This is another £11 single ticket.If there are a few of you, it works out great to get a cab to and from the station at a few quid each. The Virgin Trains are awesome and are more like aeroplanes. You'll be at Stoke on Trent before you know it.Definitely go and take a look on London Midland though, some great offers on there for Travel to Alton.

As far as I know, the water that cascades down the drop is known as a "show pump", which is similar to most flume rides. It is just for show and has very little to no impact to how the ride operates. In that case, I want those three hours back I queued during the Heatwave of Easter 2002.