Right after I started posting again the site is down.
It seems that a lot of alt sci sites are being torched.
@Num7, is this when I first switched Paranormal Network to Paranormalis?
I remember a lot of people having a hard time typing out “paranormalnetwork.net” back then and I spent WEEKS looking up different phrases in the thesaurus and Latin dictionaries trying to come up with something cool.
I’m not sure how I landed on Paranormalis, but it was a play on some other Latin word I’d put through Google Translate. It worked out well!
Hmm, from what I have in my notes, The switch from TPN to Paranormalis would have occurred around April 2006. So this person asking about TPN in early 2007, either couldn’t find TPN anymore or hadn’t found Paranormalis yet. Or Paranormalis was down for maintenance.
Again, according to my notes, Paranormalis rebooted from nothing around February 2007, so that would fit. The “Bain incident” must have happened in late 2006, which must have caused the site to be offline for several weeks or months, until the reboot in Feb 2007.
This, here, would be the last TPN snapshot, taken on 2006-04-04:
http://web.archive.org/web/20060404024947/http://paranormalnetwork.net/
Then here, the first Paranormalis snapshot, taken on 2006-04-04. It looks like shit because the theme didn’t render properly.
https://web.archive.org/web/20060423065045/www.paranormalis.com/forums.php
Here are the announcements that you posted at the time you rebooted Paranormalis is 2007:
And the forum at that time:
https://web.archive.org/web/20070311075350/http://www.paranormalis.com:80/
All of this feels like it happened a century ago.
I remember you told me Paranormalis was a compression of “para” which means outside, and “normalis” which means normal, in Latin. It’s pretty clever if you ask me. But it doesn’t feel any easier to type than “paranormalnetwork.net” lol
Man, the adventures of early bulletin boards are some of my favorite memories. Most things were a hot mess, it was very much a wild west feeling back then.
I found this just now:
I don’t remember if this is where the name came from or not, but it seems plausible. Google Translate has probably changed over the years and is not giving me the same results for translating “outside” to Latin:
The Bain incident was awful. I worked at Target at the time and had zero money. I couldn’t even afford a vBulletin license anymore, so I moved things to Simple Machines Forums (which is crap, but not as bad as phpBB).
This guy Bain popped up out of nowhere and offered to buy the site for… 500 or 700 dollars? I don’t remember, but it was enough to where I could have really used it. He asked for a login to see what the admin section looked like, but since I was new to the SMF software, I didn’t realize there was a tool that conveniently lets you just dump the database. That was a fun morning when I discovered it was possible to do that.
He had set up some kind of escrow payment on PayPal and the domain was already in the middle of being transferred, but I was naive and hopeful the whole thing would shake out. Still, he took the whole deal and moved it to his own setup, and I never saw a dime. Totally scammed. Then he sold or gave it to Grayson once I started making noise about it, and that was pretty much it.
At the time, Grayson had split off from Time Travel Forum to start Conspiracy Cafe. That’s a whole other story with its own drama, but suffice it to say they weren’t on friendly terms with TPN and felt they deserved ownership more than I did. So I started over to prove I could do it. I remember Grayson being impressed that I had the gumption to not give up.
It worked out in the end, though. I eventually handed the reigns of Paranoramlis over to @Num7 (late 2009) - I was just starting a new career in IT and didn’t have time for the harassment and hacking that was taking place. In hindsight, it wasn’t that big of a deal, but I pulled a Mop and was ready for something different. @Num7 has turned it into an awesome niche community that’s been running for many years now.
Hopefully this reset can be that kind of new beginning for TTI 
AXJ use to have this same issue back in 1998 of the website being down all the time for unexplained reasons so our Founding Members took the decision to create 5,000 websites around the world all united in a VPN…has been working fine ever since…
