The Northlands 4.0

Entry posted by Timberwolf September 28, 2017

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OK, so I have been asked a few times why we decided to bring NL back. Before I do that, I'd like to take a moment and talk about the different stages of The Northlands.

1.0	Northlands Fantasy and Northlands
Northlands Fantasy was first started after one of the many nukes at Fantasy Essentials (FE). A few members from FE and myself were a little tired of that and how the members were treated if they questioned what happened, of course that caused people to phuk with him more. This is why Northlands Fantasy was created. During it's life, @hirondelle and I were kind of chased away from the boards when I moved out here to Thailand. While we were away, the lovely @Moonhawk was one of the people that did what he could to keep Northlands Fantasy alive. Thank you brother. When hirondelle and I came back to Northlands Fantasy, we decided to do a few nice things for our members, and we reskinned Northlands Fantasy and renamed it Northlnads. Shortly after that we created the next version The Northlands 2.0.
2.0	The Northlands
To continue to show our members how much we loved them and appreciated them keeping Northlands Fantasy alive, we decided to purchase a domain name. We looked at Northlands, but it was taken, and The Northlands was suggested, and we liked it, so we went for it. We (when I say we, I mean hiro was looking, and I was waiting for her to make a decision) looked at the different types of board software that was available at the time. The two main candidates were vBulletin and Invision Power Boards (IPB). Hiro did a lot of research about these boards, and I remember her explaining to me the difference in the two different types of software. One of the things that she loved was the way the profile page looked in the 2.8 version of IPB, it was a look the vBulletin didn't have. So we decided to go with IPB. The next step was to try find a decent look for the new board. We ended up finding this person that made skins (they are now called themes) by the name of Fleshy, and we loved the way a number of her skins looked. We ended up getting four (4) skins, if I remember correctly, our names for them were The Woods, Serenity, Winter and Twilight (which I used to create the 18+ skin when we had one of those). Then we lost everything when we moved to a new host, and started back over at 1.0. We ended up bringing everything back to 2.0 and we found another great skinner by the name of Dragonfly, and she built some beautiful skins, which we got quite a few beautiful skins. Over the years, I got tired of how some things kept happening that I just didn't agree with and it all finally came to ahead, and I decided to make a change.
3.0	The Northlands (blog)
When everything came to ahead, I made some big changes. The Northlands (forum with a blog) stopped being and I changed it to The Northlands (blog with a small forum). With this, I had a number of other bloggers as well as hiro and myself. The little forum that I had was a little clunky and plain, but it worked. Once I did this, I was never really happy. I missed the community that we had on The Northlands (forum). Yes, I wrote some blogs while there (all of this is at NL Archive), and other wrote quite a few blog posts, it just didn't feel like home any more and I ended up going back there less and less. I was pretty upset with what had become of The Northlands.
4.0	The Northlands (forum)
One day, on Facebook, I got a notification that Invision Power Systems (Invision Power Boards) had changed their facebook page name to Invision Communities. This prompted me to go to their website and have a look. While doing that, I had this longing for The Northlands that was our home, not what I had made it become. I saw a theme (what used to be a skin) that I thought would be perfect for The Northlands, which I sent to hiro, and she loved it as well. This made us start talking about maybe bringing The Northlands back, and we actually started getting excited about it. The more we talked about it, the more we got excited about bringing it back. After about two (2) days (if that), we decided we were going to do it. This is what you see today.