Yes, you’re finally in the right place, although you’d be forgiven for being confused or lost on your way here by the several copycats that have propped up lately.
So, what’s exactly going on? Well, let’s be open about this for a second – this site uses a theme. I only have so many hours in a week to make this site happen, and truth be told i’d much rather be putting it towards great content then finessing a site to the point of perfection only to never actually ship (DreamNova, anyone?)
So with this in mind, imagine my surprise when I discovered this.
Even the photo was a virtual ripoff. I felt a little disgusted. Like I had put in blood, sweat and tears into something I love only for someone else to swoop in and steal my hard-earned effort. A copycat of this site, already?
I knew who “Thrillz” (a cheap copy of Australia’s leading theme park site, Parkz) actually belonged to so I thought it’d be worth sending a message to the owner. Despite what happened, I eventually offered the benefit of the doubt. He told me it was a legitimate mistake. His friend apparently made the site and didn’t know any better. For the next few days I got the run around. Take note of the timestamps.
After a while, I got the shits. What I started to realise was that I was letting others essentially copy openly what I’ve been working on. They’ve knocked off one site’s name, and another site’s design. In this case, imitation isn’t the sincerest form of flattery. More discussion ensued and to say it was endless was an understatement to say the least.
Despite finally some action being confirmed to finally have the clone changed, the next day rolled round and nothing had changed. This really started to upset me and I was clearly being taken for a ride at this point. I was being dragged into crap that was ultimately, incredibly petty. After that, I made a comment after Thrillz posted a link to their website on Parkz, which, caused a real stir. Why? Well, someone else summed up the situation of what I was doing with Ourworlds versus what Thrillz was doing.
Then it got really ugly. Today this creature below (made by the same guys, no less) reared its ugly head.
I wish I had the original version of the page, it was an almost copy of our logo, globe and all. That’s not to say what’s there isn’t currently either – they’re using a tightly kerned helvetica light logo too.
So why should you care? Richard Wilson, the owner of Parkz summed it up well, actually.
“Some of the sites and Facebook pages out there so grossly misrepresent themselves that it will be genuinely damaging to the overall theme park community if they’re given a free pass. We’re not going going to enable people that copy their name, design or even content, buy fake Facebook/Instagram likes to artificially inflate their presence so they can call themselves the “biggest”, because it affects anyone else who has worked hard to build an audience or brand, and who knows what other lies they’re telling parks to try and get a foot in the door. We’ve seen in the past the sort of damage that overenthusiastic folks can do when they annoy theme park PR teams.”
I’ve been fortunate and in my eyes, incredibly lucky, to be able to create unique, engaging content for both Adventure World and now Dreamworld and hopefully with more parks and more content in the future. But doing silly, un-integral things like what these two brothers are doing directly and greatly impact the already small enthusiast community. No one’s going to get the opportunity to do unique content and worse yet, the industry at large will continue to do what they did the last time this happened – look on with bemusement at the circus show that is this community.
The fix by the way is simple. Don’t ripoff others and support those who create fantastic hubs for us to visit like Parkz or those of us who go out of their way to try and create rich content. I have no problem with seeing, fresh, new content from other sites and to see this community grow, but when all we have is copycats and pettiness, boy oh boy are we in trouble, folks.
