Get a Free Copy of Starcraft: Remastered with Twitch Prime

Thought I'd share this, in case you have a Prime Membership on Amazon.

Probably for a short time, maybe a month, you can get a free copy of Starcraft: Remastered (the original Starcraft + Brood War) on Twitch, using your Amazon Prime account.

Just log on to Twitch with your Amazon account that has Prime, to claim it.

Click the URL below to check it out: 
Prime Gaming | StarCraft: Remastered

Originally posted on Paranormalis.

Get a Free Copy of Starcraft: Remastered with Twitch Prime | Paranormalis

Slayers Online MMORPG

I thought about this game last weekend for no reason. It’s like it called to me.

Like a couple of weeks ago when I turned to vBulletin and looked at how they’re doing right now, I figured I’d write a post about it. Welcome to another small trip down memory lane, looking at old shit that used to be cool.

This is an attempt at making this a series about nostalgia and good memories. We’ll see what the future holds.

Ready? Slayers Online is a free French RPG game. It’s got (I think) a solid player base in France, but not much outside of it, as far as I know. I don’t think it’s available in other languages either, so I’m pretty sure it has zero player base in English-speaking countries.

But it’s no big deal because just looking at the graphics will remind you of a couple of similar RPG games you played back in the early 2000s. 100% pure old crappy 2D games. It’s all about nostalgia!

Create an Access Control List to Block a Country

Paranormalis gets scraped by a lot of Russian bots and it slows it down sometimes. Also, lots of bot/fake accounts, despite all the anti-spam measures in place. I finally decided to go ahead and block the entirety of Russia from accessing the forum. 

This has nothing to do with the "blocking Russia" or "no more business with Russia" thing we've seen everywhere since early 2022. It's 100% about blocking bots. And the number of Russian bots scraping the site has increased a ton this year. That's what made me do it.

We won't miss anything. We don't have any active members (or occasional members at all) from Russia as far as I know. It's only bots. It will hopefully make the site faster and more stable.

I found this tool, which generates IP range lists from countries in the output format of your choice. In my case, I chose to go the HTACCESS way. So I checked "Russian Federation" and "Apache htaccess Deny". I ended up with a list of over 24 000 deny entries that I added to the forum's HTACCESS file.

That did the trick! 
Create an Access Control List to Block Countries or Continents

vBulletin Memories

Nearly 2 decades ago, vBulletin used to be the best forum software around. Until they were bought by Internet Brands in 2007, whose only interest is money. 

In the following 3 to 4 years, Internet Brands drove vBulletin to the ground. They lost their employees, and their new releases were all absolute shit. Even today, vBulletin 5 is one hell of a stinker. Stay away from it. 

Then around 2011, everybody moved their forums to XenForo and never looked back. vBulletin was becoming a thing of the past. 

For some reason, something made me think of vBulletin today, so I decided to take a look at their official forum and their modding community, vB.org. Oh boy, the years haven't been kind to them. These sites are basically dead now. 

Wasting Your Time on the Internet in 2005

Restoring long-lost content on Paranormalis using the Chronovisor technique really brings me back to those days I’d spend, fooling around on the Internet, so many years ago. Basically, wasting my time, you know... 

Here’s one of those threads: https://paranormalis.com/threads/manhattan-island-abduction.19078/

It feels like we’re back in 2005 all over again, right? 

What was I doing on the Internet back in the day? Well, I wasn’t doing much, most of the time. Youtube wasn’t around yet. I don’t think we had high-speed Internet yet. You couldn’t plug yourself on Netflix and spend the whole day watching series after series.