Welcome to Paranormalis Version 2.0

Welcome to the new Paranormalis, powered by XenForo. As I was able to migrate the site from vBulletin 4 to XenForo in less than a few hours, I decided to make it live tonight, and enjoy the place. I totaly like the current state of the forum, although it's just a default installation. I'm going to explain later why I'm not customizing the site yet. Let's go back in time...

As you all know, history repeats itself: Every new episode of Paranormalis starts with apologies from the administrator.

In the last 10 months, I tried to make Paranormalis a better place, a better site, because I thought I knew what it needed to become the best in its brand. After multiple efforts at tweaking vBulletin 4, enforcing forum rules, adding and removing site sections, I came to get uninterested tired and bored. I haven't been active on Paranormalis since mid August, but I didn't stop thinking about it though.

It seems that in the past 5 years, Brent, the previous owner, tried to make Paranormalis more than a forum. Long story short, he didn't succeed, and the community suffered greatly. Fast-forward to now, I'm still doing the same things as Brent did in 2005-2009. I didn't learn anything from his mistakes and it makes me feel dumb. Things are going to change...

Paranormalis is a community, built around its forum. We don't need article databases, powerful blog engines or customizable profiles. We need an awesome forum, with awesome content. No one succeeded in making this place something else than a forum-site. Time Travel Forum and the Paranormal Network were only forums, and it always worked best that way. This is where XenForo gets in.

What is XenForo ? It's what vBulletin 4 was supposed to be. Let me tell you a secret: vBulletin 4 sucks. I had great hopes, and worked an endless amount of hours to rebuild Paranormalis with it. What a mess. It was bloated, slow, buggy, and supported by a retarded company that doesn't care about its customers. It had tons of incomplete features they don't even care to update, and tons of anoying and unexplainable glitches for a product that's been Gold for almost a year. Good bye vB4, we won't miss you.

XenForo is a new forum software made by the guys who brought us the old vBulletin 3 products. XenForo is the best forum software I've ever used, ever. Yes, XenForo is a forum software. No CMS, no useless crap this time. We've got a wonderful forum engine that is easy and pleasant to use. It's fast, optimized, and beautiful. That's all we need guys!

Keep in mind that XenForo isn't mature yet, it's still in its beta phase. As they release new updates, and once they reach the Release Candidate phase, I will likely start working on the site's style to make it look like Paranormalis used to. In the meantime, we're going to stick with the default blue theme!

I'm going to post more content related to XenForo, to make everyone aware of what's going on.

I'm totally looking forward to the next months to see Paranormalis grow like it deserves to. We have everything we need to become a more united and active community. Let's make this place awesome!

Sincerely

--Numenorean7

I'm glad you like it Zeo

I'm going to post a reference guide showing most of XenForo's awesome features that we're not used to yet. Although it's a beta 1, there are many ground-breaking features you guys got to see and use!

I'm glad you guys like it

I sent a mass email to recent active members yesterday, we should see some of them pretty soon!!

I'm glad you guys like it I definitely like this new piece of software, it makes the site look brand new, and it makes it feel like an actual forum. vB4 didn't have that community feeling the old previous versions used to have. Now we're in business!

Good to see you again Grayson!

I thought about it a few times now, I'm going to look for an AdWords rebate. I wish I didn't lose the one they sent me a few months ago

I'll put back ads on the site tonight to generate some revenues on the long run, and I'll post new content to social networking sites like I used to. I used to post every single bit of new content on 6 networking sites earlier this year, and it was generating between 30 and 60 clicks every time. That should be a good start.

Back then, I used to check both Google Analytics, and the who's online section for immediate numbers. It was pretty easy to spot new visitors right away, as the site was empty, then full of people in the next 3 minutes.

Twitter sure gives you a lot of visibility!

I'm going to check this out tonight, I didn't know twitterfeed bebore now. uh! All those vB4 Twitter addons didn't always work, looks like I should have know better.

I just updated the site to XenForo Beta 3 XF is definitely an awesome forum software.