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[SJ-David]

It has been over a month since the new Forums went live - hope you are enjoying them - so I thought it was time to post about some other new updates that have gone live today.

RESORTS SECTION
http://www.snowjapan...orts/index.html

We have made some fairly extensive changes to the Resorts section of the site - things that might not be quite so obvious at first, but I will explain what we have done here.

Slimming down
Over the last few months we have been going through our database of resorts and made a few decisions regarding old ski resorts in Japan that are either long-term closed or not actually even there anymore. You might remember some discussions about this last year.
Resorts that have been closed for more than a few years and seem to have little chance of re-opening have been deleted from the database.
Resorts that have also recently declared that they are going to be dismantled are also gone from the database.
We have kept the old data and perhaps will make a feature on "old resorts" sometime in the future. And of course if any resorts awake from their slumber, we will be happy to put them back up there.
We decided that keeping all those old resorts on the site was just confusing matters.
Interesting fact - the number of resorts listed on SnowJapan has been reduced from over 600 to now currently approximately 470.
Another interesting fact - apparently there were 703 ski resorts in Japan in 1993.
In a few weeks it will become apparent that some of the resorts that remain in the database are actually "closed for the coming season" - that update is coming later on.

Resort names
Each ski resort has been checked to make sure we have the full official names and for any name changes there might have been.
The new graphics on each resort page (see below for samples) represent the current name of each resort.
For reasons that are difficult to explain easily, some old text names may remain on the resort pages where there have been changes - this will be sorted out later.

Accurate map positioning
Each ski resort has been re-checked and adjusted for accurate positioning on the map pages that we have for each resort.
Some resorts were previously missing maps - they now have one.
You can find a map page for each resort either from the resort pages or from the list of resorts in a prefecture:
http://www.snowjapan...fecture=Niigata

Checking basic data
The basic data for each resort (for example, steepest slope, longest course, number of courses, elevation, etc) has been checked and verified.
We have also checked the website links for each resort and now all but a few on our site have a current official link on the page. (Some simply don't exist!)
These updates do not include data that is specific to the 11/12 season - further such updates will be made in December.
While we have tried our best to make sure there are none, being human there of course remains a possibility of small mistakes.
While we are going to be going through everything once again, if you find anything please do let us know!

More updates
There are more updates coming in the coming weeks.
We're kind of in the middle of a big ongoing long term thing that will take us well into next year, so please bear with us as we work towards our big goals.




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All of the resorts have a new graphical header, looking like this
http://www.snowjapan...orts/index.html







All of the Places to Stay on SnowJapan also now have a new header as well, looking like this
http://www.snowjapan...otel/index.html