So what is Coaster Collector, anyway?

Somewhere in my camera roll there's a blurry photo of a ride sign, taken at an angle that suggests I was being pushed along by a crowd at the time, and I genuinely could not tell you which trip it's from. 2019? The one where it rained the whole second day? No idea. That photo is, more or less, the reason this whole thing exists.

If you've spent any real time in theme parks you probably have your own version of it - a notes app list that stopped getting updated around the third day, a spreadsheet your cousin started and abandoned, a running argument with a friend about whether you've actually ridden the thing or just stood in line for it and bailed when it went down. We all keep a mental tally of the rides we've done, and honestly most of us are pretty bad at it.

Coaster Collector is my attempt to fix that, and (I'll admit) to make the fixing a lot more fun than a spreadsheet ever was.

The short version, for the people skimming on their phone in a queue

It's a free app where you log the rides, shows and haunted houses you've actually experienced, rate them, and build up a collection over time. Every experience is a card. Every milestone is a badge. You collect under a pseudonym instead of your real name, and you can see how your collection compares with everybody else's. Universal Orlando is the first resort that's live, with more on the way.

That's the elevator pitch, but it sort of undersells the bit I care about most, which is the feeling of opening the app after a long park day and watching the day turn into something you can actually look back on.

The problem nobody really solved

I looked around before building this - of course I did, nobody wants to spend a couple of years making something that already exists. What I kept finding fell into roughly two camps. On one side you had the hardcore coaster-counting tools, which are great if you're the kind of person who knows the manufacturer and the launch speed of every ride you've been on (and hey, no judgment, some of my favorite people are exactly that person), but they can feel a bit like filing your taxes. On the other side you had general park apps, built mostly to sell you a dining reservation or tell you the wait time, and they didn't care one bit about what you'd done once you stepped off the ride.

What was missing, I think, was something in between. Something that respects the record-keeping side (because the record matters, it's the whole point) but treats the record like a collection rather than a ledger. Kids collecting trading cards don't think of it as data entry, and I didn't see why ride tracking had to be any different.

There's also a smaller, nerdier problem that bugged me for ages, which is that most trackers only care whether you've ridden something once. Credit counted, box ticked, move along. But that's not how anyone actually experiences a park! If you rode your favorite coaster eleven times in one evening because the line was walk-on after the fireworks, that's a story, and it deserves to be remembered as eleven rides, not as a single checkmark that happens to have been made very happy.

How it actually works on a park day

Here's the rough rhythm of it, from the gate to the last ride of the night.

You sign up for free and pick a pseudonym, which is the only name anybody else will ever see. Then you open your park's Experiences page (or the map, if you're more of a spatial thinker, which I am not, I get lost in parking garages) and find the ride you're about to get on.

When you're off, you log it. That's the core action and I've tried really hard to make it quick, because the realistic picture here is somebody holding a phone in one hand and a churro or a souvenir cup in the other, squinting at the screen in full Florida sun. Big buttons, high contrast, everything in reach of your thumb.

A card you haven't collected yet sits there in silver. Log it and it flips to holo, and it's yours. Ride it again, log it again, and every single ride counts toward your totals and your badges.

Then, while it's still fresh, you can rate it and leave a comment for the collectors who'll ride it next. Rating isn't a single number, either. You slide a score from 1 to 10 for each part of the ride, anywhere from “Skip it” up to “Unmissable”, and your overall score is the average of those, which I think gives a much fairer picture than one gut-feel number ever does. I'd gently suggest doing it right away rather than at the hotel that night, because your opinion of a ride has a weird way of drifting once you've had a shower and a pizza. The ride that made you scream laughing at 4pm tends to become “yeah, it was fine” by 10pm, and I'd rather the app captured the 4pm version.

Your Feed keeps the whole trail afterwards - every logged ride (each repeat its own entry), every rating and rating change, every comment, every badge and avatar you picked up. It's basically a diary that writes itself while you're busy having a good time.

The features I'd steer you toward first

Okay, this is the part where I play favorites. Everything in the app is free and nothing's locked behind a paywall, so in theory you can just poke around and figure it out, but if you asked me over a coffee which bits are worth your attention, this is roughly what I'd say.

Log every ride, not just the first one

I keep coming back to this because I think it's the thing that makes Coaster Collector feel different from a checklist. Re-rides count. They count toward your totals, they count toward badges, and a few of the badges specifically reward riding one favorite over and over again, which I think is a lovely way to honor the ride you just can't get enough of. Forgot to log something from a previous trip? There's a “Log a previous ride” button on every experience, where you just pick the day you rode it, so your history doesn't have to start from the day you installed the app.

Rate things honestly (and comment, if you've got something to say)

Ratings are where the community side of the app really starts to pull its weight. A 7 from a stranger isn't worth much on its own, but a pile of ratings from people who logged the ride, each one scored part by part, and a handful of comments explaining why the back row is apparently a completely different experience, add up to something genuinely useful for the next person planning their day. One small rule I'm rather proud of is that you can only rate a ride once you've collected it, so every score on a ride's page comes from somebody who has actually been on it. You can re-rate later if you change your mind, too, and the Feed keeps track of the change, which I find oddly satisfying when I look back and see that a ride I scored a 6 crept up to a 9 over three visits. Some rides are growers, I suppose.

Depending on your privacy settings, some of your comments can show as “A collector” instead of your pseudonym, and your avatar stays hidden on those unless you choose to show it, so nobody can work out it's you from a distinctive picture.

Badges, which are earned and never bought

I was pretty stubborn about this one. Badges unlock on their own as your log grows, and there's no way to pay your way into one. Some ask for a number of rides or parks, some want every ride at one park (the completionists know exactly what I'm talking about), and some want you to ride a single favorite again and again. Each comes in bronze, silver or gold, from easiest to hardest. The gold ones are meant to be a bit of a slog, if I'm being totally honest, because a badge that everybody gets on day one isn't really a badge, it's a participation sticker.

> Where: `/badges`, signed in, on a desktop, with a mix of earned and unearned badges showing and at least one each of bronze, silver and gold in view.

> Alt text: “The Badges page, with bronze, silver and gold badges, some earned and some still locked.”

It's worth knowing that a ride's own page lists the badges that ride counts toward, so if you're standing in front of something and wondering whether it's worth the wait, that little list can be quite the motivator.

> [SCREENSHOT 9 (optional) - Badges on a ride's page]

> Where: a ride's page, scrolled to “Badges this ride counts toward”, on a phone.

> Alt text: “The list of badges a single ride counts toward, on that ride's page.”

Avatars, a.k.a. the face you collect under

Rather than uploading a selfie (which, given the whole pseudonym thing, would kind of defeat the purpose), you pick an avatar, and it shows beside your name everywhere, on your profile, on your ratings and on your comments. A few are yours the day you sign up, and the rest unlock as you collect, by rating rides, posting comments, collecting experiences and earning badges. Once you've unlocked one it's yours for good, so there's no anxiety about losing it if you take a long break between trips.

The map

The map lays out every park and attraction, so you can see what's around you, and it tells you how many of a park's rides you've collected so far. It's handy for planning a day, but I mostly love it for the slightly painful moment when you zoom in on a land you thought you'd finished and spot the one ride you somehow skipped. Every trip I've taken since I started using it has involved at least one detour for exactly that reason.

> [SCREENSHOT 12 - The map]

Photo contests

Every so often a ride opens up for photos and collectors can enter their shots, with a gallery for everybody to browse. If you'd rather not have your name on it, you can enter as Anonymous and it still counts toward your badges. I'm not going to pretend my own photography is going to win anything (see the blurry sign, above), but some of what gets submitted is honestly better than what you'd find on the official channels.

> [SCREENSHOT 14 - Photo contests]

> Where: `/photo-contests`, on a desktop, with at least one contest open and a few photos in its gallery. Only use photos whose owners agreed to them being shown, or your own.

> Alt text: “The Photo Contests page, with an open contest and collectors' photos in its gallery.”

Privacy, because it matters more than people think

I'll be blunt about why the pseudonym thing exists. A ride log is, if you think about it for a second, a pretty detailed record of where you've been and when. I didn't want anyone's real name sitting next to that by default, so it isn't. Your pseudonym is the only name other collectors see, and in your profile you can decide who gets to look at your profile at all - everyone, only signed-in collectors, or nobody but you. You can also leave parts of it out, your comments for example, and there's a button to see your profile the way other people see it, which I'd recommend pressing at least once. None of that is buried three menus deep, either, it's right there in your profile.

> [SCREENSHOT 15 - Profile privacy]

> Where: `/profile`, signed in, on a phone, scrolled to “Profile privacy” with the “Who can see your profile” choices and the switches under “What others can see”. Blur or swap out your email address if it shows anywhere on screen.

> Alt text: “The profile privacy settings, choosing who can see the profile and what they're shown.”

About the money side of things

Coaster Collector is free, and it's going to stay free. Unlimited logging, unlimited ratings, the full badge and bucket list system, all of it. The free version shows the occasional ad in your Feed, which is how the lights stay on.

If the ads bug you, Premium is $2 a month or $16 a year, and it clears them out of the app completely and puts a Contributor badge on your profile. That's genuinely the whole difference. I didn't want to build an app where the good stuff sits behind a paywall and the free tier is just a demo, and I still don't, so there won't ever be a feature you can only use by paying.

What's coming next

A few things are cooking that I'm quite excited about, though I'll avoid promising dates because I've been burned by my own optimism before. The big one is competitive check-ins, where a log counts as “competitive” only if you check in while you're actually standing near the ride (within roughly 150 metres of it). Casual logging isn't going anywhere, and you'll always be able to log a ride you did years ago, but for the folks who want a leaderboard that can't be padded from the couch, this is going to be the fair way to compare.

More parks and resorts are on the way too. Universal Orlando went first mostly because it's where I've spent the most time, and having an Epic Universe to add to the catalog right as we got going didn't hurt.

## If something's wrong, please tell us

Every experience page has a “Report an error with this listing” link, and I'd honestly be grateful if you used it. Park catalogs change constantly - rides get rethemed, renamed, closed for a whole season, quietly removed - and while we work hard to keep things accurate, a whole community of collectors with phones in their hands are always going to spot things quicker than we will. Retired rides don't vanish, by the way, they just get stamped as decommissioned, and you can still log the days you rode them, rate them and comment. Nobody should lose a piece of their history because a park decided to bulldoze something to make room for a new land.

Where to start

If you've read this far you're probably at least a little curious, and the easiest first step doesn't even need an account, because every experience, badge and avatar is open to browse before you sign up. Have a look around the Experiences page, find a ride you love, and see what people are saying about it. And if you've got a trip coming up, maybe make a bucket list the night before instead of trying to remember everything at the gate.

Or, you know, just pick a pseudonym and log the last ride you went on. It's a weirdly satisfying little moment when that first card flips from silver to holo, and I think it'll make sense the second you see it.

See you in the queue.