Richard

We've updated the forum software today. Aside from the obvious visual changes there's the addition of a few new features, most noticeably reactions instead of votes. Gone is the crude and often political system of voting posts up and down. Instead you can choose to react more akin to how Facebook works now. Current reactions are as follows: Like (+1 to the poster) Haha (+1 to the poster) Confused Sad We're no longer assigning negative votes to posts as the new system is a bit more nuanced. We may add some others down the track that are more fun and unique to Parkz. Bugs / Errors / Glitches If you encounter any glitches or design quirks throughout the site that you think probably shouldn't be there, feel free to grab a screenshot and let us know.

I'd agree that Dreamworld is a oversized park @AlexB. They could safely lose all their undeveloped land and still have loads of room to grow for decades to come with land within the traditional park boundaries that's either no longer used or has never been used. The issue I have is that you really should expect bigger plans to remain competitive when their popularity and product offering is continually being dwarfed by competitors. We see Village Roadshow down the road using every remaining inch of land they have to build a tourist destination. They're catering to an incredibly vast segment of the market and everything about this plan is designed to create an all-inclusive holiday destination that keeps people on-site and away from competitors. Those same charts that Ariadne uses to highlight Ardent Leisure's lack of investment and missed opportunity -- namely the year-on-year and projected growth of tourist visitation -- should be every reason not to sell off land for the paltry price of $1 million a hectare at a time when your current competitors are ramping up their offering and expanding well beyond the confines of the traditional theme park. The amount of space Dreamworld have both within the park and surrounding it is their single biggest long-term strategic asset. $25 million for a theme park of this size and profitability isn't a one-off investment that you fund by extraordinary means, it should be what they're spending every few years on a robust mix of major and minor attractions.

Sorry missed this one until now @AlexB. Yeah if you have already purchased t-shirts from us in the past then where possible we'll send something different. If there's nothing different available we'll get in touch and let you know your options.

The opening date was pushed back to 2018 long ago. The construction that has happened so far is likely because contracts were already in place for this component of the job. More accurately, they're way ahead of schedule; things will likely slow down from here on in.

A few months ago it was all about imagination, now it's about experiences? Sounds like precisely the opposite of of identifying their core values. It's laughably over-the-top and transparent use of a buzzword in place of actual substance. It's a nervous brand totally unsure of who and what they are, run by a management team that has no gut-level understanding of the theme park industry, or even what Dreamworld is. Adding the word 'experience', 'magic' or 'precinct' to everything doesn't make it so.

Those stats mentioned by Mr Sharry -- 15m tower, 120°, 64km/hr (18m/s) with a 28m maximum swing height -- are the same as The Claw's stats. If this ride is actually any bigger than The Claw then it's a result of minor changes over the years to the exact same model from Intamin, rather than an actual larger version of the ride.

The documents on the website indicates that they think that the Gold Coast tourism and theme park industry is a viable one with solid projected growth. They also note that Ardent have significantly under-invested in development CapEx for their parks. From a stakeholder's perspective, the question is whether the capital required for Ardent to turn this division around is best served in that capacity, or would be better put to use fixing the botched Main Event roll-out in the USA. As it stands Ardent's current management want to have their cake and eat it too; they insist that they couldn't possibly want to sell the park (despite doing everything possible to indicate that is in fact on the cards), yet they are also doing nothing to suggest that they realise the kind of investment Dreamworld needs to rectify not just the fallout from what happened on Thunder River Rapids, but from a strategic and deliberate starving of capital for their 20-odd years of ownership.

I just had a look in the app and despite that confusing 11-4 thing on the first page (the review a year ago pointed this out too...) it does appear to still allow you to choose ASAP, or any time in five minute increments during the outlet's opening hours, further into the ordering process.

They have been this way for about six months. A few reasons: testing showed that they got more exposure and interaction in this forum, the tagging system is able to make them stand out better than it used to, and of course... they are theme park related. The plan is to move all the old articles over (they'll of course be buried many pages back) and remove that section permanently. That just requires the development of a script that updates all the links and images in the old articles (some date back to Roller-Coaster.com.au days).

The real question is how does an outlet with a small menu of pre-made fast food ever have a queue of 20 minutes? How much business is being lost by folks deciding that a $25 burger combo just isn't worth the wait in that scenario? I used the app once. I set a pick up about 15 minutes later because I wasn't nearby and was in no hurry. It pinged me about three minutes later saying my food is ready. When I finally arrived they didn't just grab the next burger sitting in the heat chute but rather ducked back into the kitchen and grabbed the same item that had been sitting god-knows-where waiting for me. I wrote a review on the system a year ago that I never hit publish on. This was early on so I'd like to think they fixed these pretty glaring issues, rendering my less-than-stellar review outdated.

@Slick, the mindset that sees Movie World think that it's necessary to put a logo on every single picnic bench? Classic move by brands that wants to appear big... put a logo on everything.

I believe it did reopen briefly @Adventures With JWorld, but this section of the article is based on the park's own statements on the matter which lumps these three rides together: The issue with the passes isn't that they're all gone immediately. The extensions means there's a chunk with ~6 months left, and of course there's no question that they've sold new passes since the accident. It's that everything we're seeing and hearing about trading patterns at the park to date suggests that there will be a marked drop as renewals and new pass purchases are all but certainly a fraction of their pre-accident figures.

Thanks guys.

Grants for this were announced in September. I'd say it's just a coincidence that both parks are involved with research projects that are helping to fund minor attractions/additions.

Oops @AlexB... I noticed that caption was wrong yesterday and fixed it in the photo gallery but not in the article.