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Rides at Buffalo Bill's Casino closed until further notice

Matt N

CF Legend
According to Screamscape, the rides at Buffalo Bill's Casino in Nevada are "closed until further notice", including the Arrow hypercoaster Desperado. Lance is not currently sure whether it's just a temporary thing, or whether it is a permanent closure. Here's a link to Screamscape: http://www.screamscape.com/html/las_vegas.htm
Sounds interesting to say the least. We'll have to see what happens.
 

Matt N

CF Legend
False alarm. Screamscape now says that this is just a seasonal occurrence.
P.S. Sorry for double posting.
 

lachlan

Mega Poster
The website still says they are closed until further notice, does it say that every year?

TBH I gave up reading Screamscape because of how awful it is on mobile.
 

Hixee

Flojector
Staff member
Administrator
Moderator
Social Media Team
TBH I gave up reading Screamscape because of how awful it is on mobile.
To be fair, it's not much better on the desktop! :p

Desperado is one of those coasters that looks fab, but is actually pretty crap. It'd be a shame for it to go, but equally it wouldn't really be missed...
 

JanxRw

Roller Poster
Sorry for bumping in this old thread, but I'm interested if you found some other rides, besides Desperado, and can recommend me some. I want to go with my family and have a good time.
 

LisaPullman

Roller Poster
Raises suspicious eyebrow...

Are you a well disguised bot, or have you gotten the wrong impression about what we do here? :p
Maybe we both got the wrong impressions about each other? :) But I'm apologizing if you thought that something is wrong with my reply.
 

Peet

Giga Poster
Sorry for bumping in this old thread, but I'm interested if you found some other rides, besides Desperado, and can recommend me some. I want to go with my family and have a good time.
A bit of a broad question, but if you are searching for roller coasters, this is the website for you:

In Las Vegas, the obvious ones are at the New York New York Hotel and the Adventuredome.
 

Christian

Hyper Poster
Sorry for bumping in this old thread, but I'm interested if you found some other rides, besides Desperado, and can recommend me some. I want to go with my family and have a good time.

There is really no reason for you to be in Primm. Either you drive 40 miles to Las Vegas and you have the Adventuredome and a ton of other things. Or you drive 230 miles and you have Six Flags Magic Mountain which is now reopening.
 

Pokemaniac

Mountain monkey
Staff member
Administrator
Moderator
Maybe we both got the wrong impressions about each other? :) But I'm apologizing if you thought that something is wrong with my reply.
I'm raising an eyebrow like @Hixee, but then I'm also raising another one. And then I'm reaching into the rarely-used CF Banhammer locker. I'm going to ask for a minute of folks' time to explain what is wrong.

First off, the accounts of @LisaPullman and @JanxRw were created within five minutes of each other this past Friday. JanxRw bumped this thread on 1:26 today. Three minutes later, LisaPullman made their introduction post in the Members forum. Then half an hour later, LisaPullman replies to JanxTw's bumped post. What a strange coincidence that two new members, registered at the same time on Friday, both chose to wait exactly three days before making some of their first posts in the very same thread that hadn't seen any news since 2018! And the topic *just so happened* to mention casinos?

Lo and behold, they share the same IP address. Co-inki-dee-do.

I'd be willing to bet that the plan going forward is one of the following:

A) Jan posts to thank Lisa for their help, and asks Lisa if she has any online casinos to recommend. Lisa makes a post gushing all over this shady casino site she's been having so much fun with. Further thanks from Jan to follow.

B) Lisa edits their post to add links to the aforementioned shady casino site.

Either way, the approach seems to be that some tragically soulless schmuck somewhere makes two accounts manually, and engages in a bit of on-topic chatter with each other and other members, before finding a way to steer the conversation on to online casinos in a way that sounds so natural even mods don't mind. A thread made specifically to advertise a shady online casino will be flagged and banned immediately. But a legitimate news thread made by somebody else, with some actual conversation in it, already has some legitimacy with the search engines. Google and others like them will think "This is an old thread with actual activity by multiple users over a long time. It is already indexed and visited by our bots multiple times over multiple years, so it must be a legitimate page. Any links posted here will probably have been posted by an actual user with intent to inform other users, not to advertise a business. A legitimate link from a legitimate forum page, probably leads to a legitimate site. We'll give that site a slightly higher rating in our search engine".

Now, judging from the replies, there's an actual person somewhere behind the accounts. I'm half tempted to ask them which of their accounts they'd like to be banned and which to receive warning points up to the notch before a ban, but seeing as the game is up already the only likely outcome is that the spam links (or something obscene) are posted immediately. Instead, I'll ban both accounts but keep the posts up, on the off chance that some legitimate user pops in to offer actual news about Desperado.
 
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cocoa

Mega Poster
that's a thing that someone would be bothered doing here?? jeez i didnt know the theme park enthusiast market was so lucrative. I guess you just need one person to fall for your scam to make bank...

btw I was thinking of hitting some online casinos later anyone got a good link? please include the 3 nubmers on the back of ur credit card
 

Pokemaniac

Mountain monkey
Staff member
Administrator
Moderator
that's a thing that someone would be bothered doing here?? jeez i didnt know the theme park enthusiast market was so lucrative. I guess you just need one person to fall for your scam to make bank...
No, its intent is not to fool the actual users of the site, but the search engines that index them.

I'm no computer expert, so my understanding of this is somewhat limited - I read an article a long while ago. But from what I can tell, Google and the other big sides have this nice way to rank the "quality" of sites they've got indexed, so they can tell what is relevant to a search and what's just random garbage. One way to tell the quality of a site is to tell the quality of the sites that link to them.

Say for instance that you've got a website containing a piece of information about, say, the coasters you think are the best in the world. Google will come across your site eventually, and flag it as "it has something to do with the world's best coasters, and it exists, and that's it." Somebody searching for "the world's best coasters" would be likely to find your website on page 27 of the Google search or something.

Then imagine you want your website to rank higher on the Google search, because you know that your ad revenue will increase if your website is found on one of the first 10 pages of the Google search. One way to do that is to be cited. Some other website must link to your page, or "cite" you. If lots of sites cite your website, it will be flagged as very relevant to the topic in question, because lots of other sites lead there. It must be talked about a lot. Respected. That's the way to end up on the first few pages on the Google search. I've heard the term "juice" being used here, but I'm not sure if it's an established term or something invented by the journalist who wrote the one article I read. Either way, it's a good allegory. If your website is cited, its's getting "relevance juice", and juice is the way to the top of the search results.

But you can't just sign up for a hundred different blog services and add a link to your website from an otherwise empty blog in each of them. Google will notice that nobody reads the blogs that cite your website, and it will be flagged as "cited by a bunch of nobodies - likely a deliberate attempt to influence the algorithm", and they would punish you for that. It's bad juice, completely without nutrients. That's the way to end up on page 65 of the search instead.

Conversely, imagine if The Guardian ran an article about the world's best coasters, and cited your website. Suddenly, you're getting traffic from a really respected source. Google notices that a really verified and trusted source cites your website, moving you way up near the top of the search. Good juice. If they cite you several times, or if Washington Post decides to jump on the "world's best coasters" bandwagon and cite you as well, you're getting lots of good juice from several good sources, high placements in the Google search results, and conversely, sweet website traffic and advertising revenue.

CF and other forums, I imagine, sits somewhere in between. We're a somewhat respected source on one topic, so even forum threads here come quite high up on the search results if you search for something coaster related. If your website is cited by a CF thread it might climb a little on the ranking. A citation from CF is decent juice. In itself it's a far cry from The Guardian, but also a far cry from those pages created exclusively to host links en masse. Even baby steps count. And if your website is cited by a thread on CF, and on TPR, and TowersTimes, and all those other forums out there, you're getting decent juice from a lot of sources. That's enough to climb the ladder a bit. If all the forums cite your website when talking about the world's best coasters, naturally Google will think you're a go-to source for that sort of topic. Note that they probably wouldn't bother much to distinguish whether the page in question has anything to do with the topic of the forum. As long as the source has a relevant keyword somewhere in the title, it's indexed. Presumably, the word "Casino" in this thread title may be enough to convince Google that we're discussing casinos in this thread, and thus they will provide a bit more juice to any linked source that talks about casinos. It's flagged as relevant to the topic at hand, and that's probably why Jan and Lisa sought it out in the first place.

I imagine a thread gives better juice if it has been active for a while, is not locked, is in a part of the forum that sees a bit of traffic, and has replies from many existing members. Perhaps it even helps if the link is posted in response to a question by another user (or it could just be to make it seem more legitimate to moderators). If Lisa or Jan had made a thread on their casino preferences somewhere in the General Polls forum where no soul ever sets foot, it would have been noticed and locked, or not given much juice at all even if we had missed it. But a thread like this is just perfect. News & Rumours gets a decent bit of traffic, so it's probably the best source of juice we have on the forums.

So the aim of the spammers is to insert links to their websites in the most legitimate pages CF has to offer, in order to give juice to their website. Now, switch the phrase "world's best coasters" for "online casino", and you may see what these schmucks were up to. They're advertising some scummy site they hope to give more juice so they can get higher up on the results of a popular Google search, and thus get more traffic.

I think there is a way to mark a page - or even a whole website - to be ignored by Google entirely in this regard. That is, a citation on the page doesn't give any juice at all. I think this is commonly used by the comment sections of large newspapers. Nobody wants to bother setting up spambots if there's no juice to be had. But I'm uncertain if that's default for forums nowadays or whether CF employs this method. @furie or @ECG might know.
 

furie

SBOPD
Staff member
Administrator
Moderator
This is going to look really weird to anyone reading this, who can no longer see the banned posts :D

You're right Poke in what you're saying. It's all about legitimate clicks.

We get spam from people often on our CF emails advertising this kind of thing "Would you like professional writers to talk about your site on other sites across the internet?"

It's never as clear as "we'll write spam on every other forum and blog in the world to advertise your site", but that's what it is. It's very clever to be honest, and it means you have real people making the effort, so it's incredibly difficult to stop.

The idea of multiple posts is to get over the limit we have before you can post links.

How do we fight this? Exactly like this. This person has been paid to do this. They won't have been paid pennies either. We let them post, we pick it up, we ban hammer them, nobody gets an advert, but there's a cost. Every cost for no return is a tiny win for us.
 

Hyde

Matt SR
Staff member
Moderator
Social Media Team
This thread makes me feel like I took the red pill to see how far the rabbit hole goes.


There is really no reason for you to be in Primm. Either you drive 40 miles to Las Vegas and you have the Adventuredome and a ton of other things. Or you drive 230 miles and you have Six Flags Magic Mountain which is now reopening.
to answer this question with your answer - Buffalo Bill’s is just a gambling stop on the way to Vegas from LA, along with a few other strip casinos on the way. Indeed, it’s a “commuter” coaster.
 

gavin

Moderator
Staff member
Moderator
Social Media Team
I'm raising an eyebrow like @Hixee, but then I'm also raising another one. And then I'm reaching into the rarely-used CF Banhammer locker. I'm going to ask for a minute of folks' time to explain what is wrong.

First off, the accounts of @LisaPullman and @JanxRw were created within five minutes of each other this past Friday. JanxRw bumped this thread on 1:26 today. Three minutes later, LisaPullman made their introduction post in the Members forum. Then half an hour later, LisaPullman replies to JanxTw's bumped post. What a strange coincidence that two new members, registered at the same time on Friday, both chose to wait exactly three days before making some of their first posts in the very same thread that hadn't seen any news since 2018! And the topic *just so happened* to mention casinos?

Lo and behold, they share the same IP address. Co-inki-dee-do.

I'd be willing to bet that the plan going forward is one of the following:

A) Jan posts to thank Lisa for their help, and asks Lisa if she has any online casinos to recommend. Lisa makes a post gushing all over this shady casino site she's been having so much fun with. Further thanks from Jan to follow.

B) Lisa edits their post to add links to the aforementioned shady casino site.

Either way, the approach seems to be that some tragically soulless schmuck somewhere makes two accounts manually, and engages in a bit of on-topic chatter with each other and other members, before finding a way to steer the conversation on to online casinos in a way that sounds so natural even mods don't mind. A thread made specifically to advertise a shady online casino will be flagged and banned immediately. But a legitimate news thread made by somebody else, with some actual conversation in it, already has some legitimacy with the search engines. Google and others like them will think "This is an old thread with actual activity by multiple users over a long time. It is already indexed and visited by our bots multiple times over multiple years, so it must be a legitimate page. Any links posted here will probably have been posted by an actual user with intent to inform other users, not to advertise a business. A legitimate link from a legitimate forum page, probably leads to a legitimate site. We'll give that site a slightly higher rating in our search engine".

Now, judging from the replies, there's an actual person somewhere behind the accounts. I'm half tempted to ask them which of their accounts they'd like to be banned and which to receive warning points up to the notch before a ban, but seeing as the game is up already the only likely outcome is that the spam links (or something obscene) are posted immediately. Instead, I'll ban both accounts but keep the posts up, on the off chance that some legitimate user pops in to offer actual news about Desperado.
I made you a new profile picture.

c14407b3593b89acce7188ada195aafb.jpg


Sent from my Redmi Note 7 using Tapatalk
 

JoshC.

Strata Poster
I hope that one day, we look back and see this thread as the start of a new forum in-joke, "casinos". It can join the likes of "aqautrax", "walls", "flojector" and all the other greats.

Or just as the thread which inspires a new detective drama based around @Pokemaniac's sleuthing.
 
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