I got some ink in IAAPA's Funworld again this year, so hooray for that. As far as trade orgs go, I think it's a pretty great association. Good people there, too.
In other news, it's great to see the sites doing crazy traffic this year. PointBuzz is near double compared to last year, which shouldn't come as a big surprise since Cedar Point hasn't opened a new roller coaster since 2007. I love that site dearly, but it's kind of annoying that it's only as popular as the park is. Funny how that works.
CoasterBuzz is also doing much better than last year. A lot of things are contributing to that, but comparing the month of May to last year is particularly useful because it's just after I relaunched the new site. I paid a lot of attention to search engine optimization, and it has paid off in a very long-tail way. Trying to "win" any big search term like "roller coaster" is a waste of time and nearly impossible, but as it turns out, you can do OK when you rank highly on hundreds of less common search terms. The other thing is that people are actually using parts of the site other than the forums, which is validating for me because that crap is a lot of work to maintain!
With surges in popularity also comes the predictable appearance of new users who annoy the piss out of you. I've been pretty hands off about moderation for years, because the community tends to discourage dipshittery and it just takes care of itself. Unfortunately, we've still had a number of trolls, attention whores and otherwise annoying people show up, but I think we're working through it. We're just now getting to June, with the prime season still a few weeks away. I'm encouraged by the way the community has spoken up against the asshats.
Right now, I'm focusing most of my attention on something new, with my dearest wife and Vice President of Product Development. Yep, I like to hand out titles because I can. I'm not quite as effective as I'd like to be in that work yet, but I'll soon have a room I can lock myself in to minimize distractions. It's all part of the 2013 master plan (which is subject to change). Stay tuned!
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