Community Update #6 - September 2024

[wolfpaw]

COMMUNITY UPDATE #6 - SEPTEMBER 8, 2024

 

Time for another ParkCrafters Community Update - welcome to our 6th update! We've got a new competition, new features, and new updates for you all to enjoy throughout ParkCrafters! Read on below to see what's new.

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20 YEARS OF ROLLERCOASTER TYCOON 3

Can you believe it's been 20 years!? The famous RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 officially turns 20 years old this October! To help celebrate this milestone, we're hosting a community-wide friendly competition that you can participate in! Join in on the fun and you could earn yourself a copy of RCT3 or a gift card along with some other goodies. Signups and information are now live!

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GET READY TO MAKE A SPLASH WITH PLANET COASTER 2!

Planet Coaster 2 is fast approaching! To get ready for the release of the Planet Coaster sequel, we've added Planet Coaster 2 to both our forums and downloads section. Who knows, maybe something special might happen on release day...?

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CHEERS LOVE, THE SUPPORT IS HERE!

We've seen an increase in a lot of support related questions to most of the main games we host here on ParkCrafters. To help further organize our community, all main games now have a support sub-category in their respective forum! All questions regarding that specific game can now be asked in there with an ability to mark an answer as 'solved' so other members can easily find solutions to some common problems. All previous support-related topics have also been moved to these new categories.

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SUNSET IN THE CITY

Due to a lack of activity and discussions, we've decided to sunset our support for the Cities: Skylines series. Since ParkCrafters opened, we always were marketed as the place for theme park simulations - Cities: Skylines always felt out of place in our community. Over time we saw little to no discussions, topics, and files uploaded regarding Cities: Skylines. We hoped that when the sequel was released, it would garner some attention but the sequel has had a rocky start so we've decided to sunset support for the series for now. If you still play and would like to discuss the Cities: Skylines series, you can do so in our Other Games category!

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SPARE CHANGE?

Donations have been added on our main forum page! It's no surprise to anyone that running a community like this - especially with a high volume of files being added to our downloads section - can be expensive. We are by no means running out of money and are in threat of shutting down, so no worries there! We just would like to further enhance and improve on our community, so we've added the option for members to donate to ParkCrafters. All donations will go towards upgrading the website and server, maintenance and server costs, events, rewards and prizes, and future new features. Donations are completely optional, so don't feel like you have to! All donations are appreciated and if you would like to donate, you can find a donation box on our homepage or view past donors and donate yourself on our donations page here.

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SURVEYS ROLL OUT

A lot has happened on ParkCrafters since we've opened our doors... but are they all good? We'd love to hear your feedback on how we've been doing so far so we're introducing surveys to ParkCrafters! These will roll out once or twice a year and are intended to gather anonymous feedback from members like you to see what we can improve and how we're doing. If you are a frequent visitor to ParkCrafters, please take a few minutes to complete our survey here! This survey will close on October 1st, 2024. Thanks for your feedback!

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BUGFIXES FOR YOU, BUGFIXES EVERYWHERE!

We've squished and fixed numerous bugs with this update. Feel free to read the full bugfix list below:

• Added 15 databases to the site's hosting
• Added an additional 25 GB storage for disk space
• Fixed an issue with pagination not working correctly on forum categories
• Added a maximum recommended PHP version warning.
• Removed the club join button from the clubs rules page.
• Improved the club overview and member page to include a page title.
• Improved the handling of the custom upgrade page to prevent errors.
• Improved bruteforce login protection across login attempts for multiple accounts.
• Fixed an issue on the profile where the solutions section would return an error if there's no class which utilizes solutions.
• Fixed alignment of club names in cover photos.
• Fixed an issue where embedding images could fail.
• Fixed an issue where the s3Delete task may not be enabled.
• Fixed alignment of club names in cover photos.
• Fixed an issue where unapproved content notifications did not use the item read status.
• Fixed an issue where the Device Usage block was displaying incorrectly.
• Fixed an issue where saved Points charts were not showing.
• Fixed an issue where announcements could be created with an end date in the past.
• Fixed an issuer where the timescale for saved charts would not change.
• Fixed an issue where the background task to move/delete content items could fail if the first comment was missing.
• Fixed the hardcoded content type name in the recognized content block.
• Fixed an issue where Moderator Activity charts were using the same date range.
• Fixed an issue where a not available item from the search index could break the daily stream subscriptions mail.
• Fixed an issue where the offset wasn't casted to an integer which could have caused an error on the events overview page.
• Improved the efficiency when viewing very large archived topics.
• Fixed an issue where forum post counts may not be accurate.
• Fixed an issue where moving the file storage location would not update the file path in the database.
• Improved the php block code validation while saving the custom blocks content.
• Fixed an issue where club categories did not show in the list when club content is visible throughout the community.
• Fixed an issue where page template names could have a space in the title.
• Fixed an issue where creating new records via REST would fail when revision history is enabled.
• Fixed an issue where deleting a database wouldn't delete all it's categories.
• Fixed an issue where club category menu entries would be shown even if the visitor has no permissions to view the page.
• Fixed an issue where guests couldn't open the club categories page.
• Fixed an issue where live topic notifications would be shown to for hidden/deleted topics.
• Removed a MySQL 5.7 specific optimization for loading content item with lots of comments.
• Removed the mention of Cities: Skylines from our rules, about us, and general information.

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STATE OF THE SITE UPDATE

As always, I'll leave you all with some of the info numbers as of today compared to when our last community update was released!

• 1,457 Total Members (+741 new members)
• 3,517 Current Files on our Downloads Section (+96 new files)
• 341 Topics Created (+89 new topics)
• 4,335 Posts Created (+1,038 new posts)
• 3,382 Reactions Given (+980 new reactions)
• 78,566 Downloads (+40,787 new downloads)
• 8,753,268 Visits Since Launch (+5,164,667 visits)

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That about wraps up this community update! We're very happy with how ParkCrafters is doing and we hope you all are enjoying your time here as well! Until the next community update! Keep crafting!

- ParkCrafters Staff Team

[m00nkinftw]

Awesome update! I can't believe it's already been 20 years since RCT3 was released, oh how time flies...

And this might be a hot take, but I think the game still looks quite good considering it's 20 years old!

 

Also, is there any other way to donate apart from PayPal? I'd love to donate a few bucks but I don't have PayPal.

Edited September 11 by m00nkinftw

[Kablary]

Great job with the section titles on this one  "Sunset in the City" and "Spare Change" made me chuckle! The community updates are always one of my favorite bits to read. The state of the site is healthy and steadily growing - that's amazing! +5mil visits since the last update is also mind-boggling...

Love the survey, love the donation box, and LOVE the new competition!! I hope this gets a lot of participation as it is the most easily accessible for people with the game. 

Thanks for your tireless dedication to ParkCrafters, Wolfie. Even with your own morbidly busy real-world job, you still carve out time to make sure PC is running smoothly for all of us misfits. You're a real gem 

 

[m00nkinftw]

1 hour ago, Kablary said:

Great job with the section titles on this one  "Sunset in the City" and "Spare Change" made me chuckle! The community updates are always one of my favorite bits to read. The state of the site is healthy and steadily growing - that's amazing! +5mil visits since the last update is also mind-boggling...

Love the survey, love the donation box, and LOVE the new competition!! I hope this gets a lot of participation as it is the most easily accessible for people with the game. 

Thanks for your tireless dedication to ParkCrafters, Wolfie. Even with your own morbidly busy real-world job, you still carve out time to make sure PC is running smoothly for all of us misfits. You're a real gem 

 

This, so much this. The fact that this website is a one-stop shop for everything I need in RCT3 (community, other people's designs, tons and tons of downloads and way more) and is still alive and breathing in 2024 is just amazing considering RCT3 doesn't have the biggest community. 

[Overxhaul]

3 hours ago, m00nkinftw said:

This, so much this. The fact that this website is a one-stop shop for everything I need in RCT3 (community, other people's designs, tons and tons of downloads and way more) and is still alive and breathing in 2024 is just amazing considering RCT3 doesn't have the biggest community. 

I also downloaded a lot of files for RCT3 down here, and just thinking i wanted to download a single CT and then leave. But in the end, i don't regret joining here. It's been one of the best choices lately

[wolfpaw]

On 9/11/2024 at 9:29 AM, m00nkinftw said:

Awesome update! I can't believe it's already been 20 years since RCT3 was released, oh how time flies...

And this might be a hot take, but I think the game still looks quite good considering it's 20 years old!

 

Also, is there any other way to donate apart from PayPal? I'd love to donate a few bucks but I don't have PayPal.

Thanks so much, glad you're enjoying ParkCrafters! We currently only have Paypal set up but I can look into additional payment gateways. Which one do you prefer so I can look into it!

21 hours ago, Kablary said:

Great job with the section titles on this one  "Sunset in the City" and "Spare Change" made me chuckle! The community updates are always one of my favorite bits to read. The state of the site is healthy and steadily growing - that's amazing! +5mil visits since the last update is also mind-boggling...

Love the survey, love the donation box, and LOVE the new competition!! I hope this gets a lot of participation as it is the most easily accessible for people with the game. 

Thanks for your tireless dedication to ParkCrafters, Wolfie. Even with your own morbidly busy real-world job, you still carve out time to make sure PC is running smoothly for all of us misfits. You're a real gem 

 

Thanks for all the kind words Kablary  Can't do any of this without my awesome mod team though!

17 hours ago, Overxhaul said:

I also downloaded a lot of files for RCT3 down here, and just thinking i wanted to download a single CT and then leave. But in the end, i don't regret joining here. It's been one of the best choices lately

Glad you're here as well - thanks for the nice comment! 

[m00nkinftw]

5 hours ago, wolfpaw said:

Thanks so much, glad you're enjoying ParkCrafters! We currently only have Paypal set up but I can look into additional payment gateways. Which one do you prefer so I can look into it!

Thanks for all the kind words Kablary  Can't do any of this without my awesome mod team though!

Glad you're here as well - thanks for the nice comment! 

Well I hope iDeal will be possible since it's the main payment method in my country. If not It'll see if I can get my old PayPal account back. Their customer service is an absolute nightmare so at one point I just gave up and never used it again

[Weber]

20 years of RCT3??  I feel old now.  And great community update!

[Wowman]

BTW - I like this darker format much better