Sam Jones

Like a lot of people my age, Neopets was the first community I was part of online. This was roughly from 2002-2007. I was really into collecting avatars for the forums. There were a few default avatars anyone could use, but you could also unlock hundreds more by going to certain places on the site, getting a good score in certain games, collecting certain kinds of items, etc. It was basically just an achievement system like in any video game. I remember setting an alarm for 2:00 am once so I could go turn on our computer and play a Neopets game you could only play in the middle of the night just to get access to that avatar.
 
So you would unlock a bunch of avatars and then go on the forums and play “Avatar Simon” or just “Av Simon.” The OP would change their avatar to one of the unlockable ones and then everyone would have to quick go change theirs to match. If you didn’t have access to that one or if you were the last one to change, you were out.
I was also part of a couple “guilds” which were basically just very rudimentary web pages (rudimentary enough that a 12-year-old could make and maintain one) within the Neopets system. I made a guild about roller coasters but I don’t think more than 3 or 4 people ever joined. I was also in a guild about Harry Potter, and I remember one summer I went to a Harry Potter themed day camp at the local theatre company and one of the other kids there was in the same guild. She was super weird IRL though. We talked on Neopets a few times after that and she seemed legitimately convinced that, like, the counselor at our day camp who was playing Lupin was literally a real werewolf.
 
The other community I was deep into from about 2005-2010 was a series of forums about the roller coaster and amusement park industry. I’ve loved roller coasters since I was a very little kid. When we first got internet around the time I started Kindergarten, my parents put together a Bookmarks folder for me that included Neopets, the Beanie Babies website (lol), and a site called Joyrides that existed for a LONG time pretty much unchanged from the late 90s, which was just pictures of different roller coasters around the U.S.

At first I was way too scared to ever post anything on a forum, but once I got into the forums on Neopets, the more “adult” ones became less scary. I was most deeply involved in three websites: ThrillNetwork, CoasterCommunity, and Theme Park Review. ThrillNetwork was my favorite. It was really active for most of the 2000s. I remember reading a bunch of looooong threads in their archive of people reacting in real time to 9/11. That was before I was a member there but it was so interesting to see. I started posting there in 2005, around the time one of the parks I went to a lot (Worlds of Fun in Kansas City) was getting ready to announce a big new roller coaster for the 2006 season.
 
Gosh, I just went to find an archive.org capture of the ThrillNetwork home page in 2006 and I got all choked up when it loaded! I loved that place! Everyone was so nice. It was so cool to talk to other people who cared about the same dorky stuff I did. And it was also really cool to have social relationships with people who weren’t all my own age. I know that dynamic can be a horrible slippery slope into harassment and abuse, especially for women and girls, but I really believe that just being able to talk to people who are older than you can be valuable and fun for a middle schooler.
 

ThrillNetwork followed the normal roller coaster forum template, which is to say there were forums for general/news/rumors discussion, construction discussion, and off-topic discussion, and a place to talk about and share projects from the various roller coaster video games (Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 being by far the best and most popular, but there was also a very popular simulator called NoLimits that you really needed training in engineering or modeling to be able to use effectively). They even had a podcast called In the Loop for a few years.
 
ThrillNetwork went under after Facebook and YouTube blew up. At some point they shut down and moved everything to their Facebook page, which I’m not sure even exists anymore.
 
The last roller coaster forum I was involved in was Theme Park Review. This is a tough one for me to talk about because it ended up being a very toxic place. It still exists actually. Anyone who was involved in any online roller coaster community in the 2000s knows about TPR and probably has a strong opinion about it. I’d say most people have a deeply negative opinion about it these days. I loved TPR at first because it was VERY active. They had huge membership numbers and there was a lot of great discussion about parks all over North America and Europe pretty much all the time. It was also by far the best place for discussion about roller coaster video games. They were also doing online video long before YouTube, which was a big draw because they had POVs of roller coasters all over the world (which they were able to get permission from the parks to do because they were basically a media outlet and they had all the right equipment). They even did big elaborate trips you could pay $3000 to go on.
 
The problem was and still is that TPR is a cult of personality surrounding the webmaster, this horrible power-fantasy goblin named Robb Alvey. Everyone knew all about his glamorous SoCal life and all his cool friends and how he proposed to his wife at Thorpe Park and then got married at Disneyland. Honestly all the red flags were there. It was gross as hell. The tone on TPR was extremely sarcastic and cynical and jaded and mean compared to the other sites I visited. It was the mid-2000s so that was totally in vogue. To this day, TPR has a “disclaimer” at the bottom of its landing page that says “You need a sense of humor to view our site, if you don't have a sense of humor, or are easily offended, please turn back now!” So in other words, Robb was a big asshole and he felt like he had free license to harass anyone who disagreed with him.
 
 I was okay with this and even liked it (regrettably) until December 2009. That spring, the park I went to most often opened a new roller coaster called Prowler that was absolutely excellent. It’s such a fun ride. Everybody loved it, like essentially universal acclaim for this ride. That made me really happy because this was my home park; I was proud to have such an awesome ride in my backyard (for once, there was something great that wasn’t in California or at Cedar Point). So in December of that year, it came out that some of the guys in Robb’s inner circle had visited this park and they rode Prowler and decided it was “overrated,” meaning now the Official Position of TPR was that this ride was Not Good and consequently Everyone Should Make Fun Of It. I responded to that post saying basically, “I mean, I’m sure you’re not lying, but what you’re saying just doesn’t line up with what everyone else in every other part of this community is saying. It sounds like you may have just ridden this ride on an off day? That happens all the time.” And I got absolutely eviscerated for that!
 
Robb personally targeted me for “attacking his friend,” said I was being a baby for defending myself after “being called out,” etc. He had his mods delete all my responses to this and he got the entire website to mock me (keep in mind, this was like, thousands of people). He referred to me as “a stupid Prowler fanboy” and “the Midwest nutjob.” Actually “Midwest nutjob” became a pretty popular turn of phrase on TPR for a while after that. Like, “this is a ride only the Midwest nutjob would like.” It was ugly. Robb eventually banned me, and we exchanged some emails when I asked him what I had actually done wrong. He ultimately totally blew up at me when he found out I had been posting about the whole situation over at CoasterCommunity and I had to cut off communication. It was a really traumatizing experience for me! Since then I’ve heard so many horror stories about Robb. He has a long history of abuse and even white-collar crime. He’s since gotten divorced and I think his poor kids have ended up in a pretty brutal and sad situation because of it. It really screws me up that TPR is still going strong and Robb still has as much power as ever.
 
Initially reta47 was my Neopets username (i.e. a misspelling of the name “Rita”), which is interesting because I was assigned male at birth and my name isn’t anything even close to Rita. When I was a kid I had a lot of gender dysphoria. I really really really felt like I was supposed to be a girl. As I got older it turned more into “not feeling like any gender” than “feeling like a girl.” But I think it’s really interesting that my instinct was to make myself look not-male online the first time I ever made a social account for myself.
I abandoned reta47 pretty quick and I don’t remember why, but for almost all of my time on Neopets my username was steelvenom2003. Steel Venom is the name of a roller coaster that opened in 2003 at the amusement park I grew up going to. People called me steel for short, and that turned into a nickname I used a lot all over the internet for a long time. I don’t remember getting close enough with anyone else on Neopets to think of them as friends.
 
I think I was steelvenom2003 or steel03 or just steel or some variation of those on all of the roller coaster sites. I hardly remember any usernames or real names of anyone else. I think there was a guy named Clint on ThrillNetwork who was pretty cool? Because CoasterCommunity was so much more localized, I knew who a lot of the members where offline. I don’t think I ever met any of them in person, but I remember recognizing one of them, a guy named Dustijn, at an event at Worlds of Fun once, and I’m still Facebook friends with another one, a guy named Jason. I also met a guy named David from TPR at an event at Worlds of Fun. He was great! We’re still Facebook friends. He’s much older than me but he was on my side when all that ugliness went down.
 
Ultimately I got banned from Neopets (or “frozen” or “iced”) in August 2007, my sophomore year of high school, because I said on the forums that AP Biology “sucks.” I think I had outgrown Neopets at that point anyway but that was a big “oh no” moment. Neopets definitely still exists but it feels so so so commercial compared to how it was when I was a kid. All these corporate tie-ins and things. I love that I can still go back and play Meerca Chase or whatever if I’m feeling nostalgic, and I’m really grateful to Neopets for creating a safe place for kids to experiment with HTML in the early 2000s, but the thing I miss most is the old forums. Realizing ThrillNetwork had shut down was sad. The Facebook version never ever could have competed. It was so wimpy in comparison. It was also distressing because I had a lot of personal history in their archives that is just gone now. There were parks I made (and that others made) in Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 that I loved that I’m never going to see again because I only uploaded them to ThrillNetwork. There are people I knew and liked who I’ve just completely forgotten.
 
By far the thing I miss most about the early roller coaster websites is the positivity. The whole online enthusiast community these days is so jaded and negative. It’s just brutally un-fun to have a discussion with any of these people in the few places that still exist to do that outside of social media. They’re also generally really sexist and pretty racist. I’m sure they always have been but in 2017 it’s SO obvious and no one is addressing it. It feels gross to even engage.
 
I also think the whole amusement park industry has changed a ton in the last decade. It’s a lot more corporate, a lot more brand-oriented. Ten years ago there were…. like six or seven different manufacturers that were consistently building really interesting rides all over North America and Europe. Now there are maybe two, and only one of them is really exciting. It feels like it all ties in—it’s just much less creative now, much less happy.