Toast Forums history
In early 2000, web developer Josh Painter was searching for a good bulletin board system for his ASP website. He was looking for something fast and scalable, easy to use and administer, and completely customizable. There were many ASP boards out there, but none that met all 3 qualifications. The rest, as they say, is history.
After a few months of coding a forum in his spare time, Josh realized that he was on to something. How cool it would be if users were able to choose different color schemes, languages and styles on the fly according to their tastes. A user-skinnable bulletin board was born. But it wasn't just customizable. It was also fast, scalable, and incredibly easy to setup and administer, thanks to the web-based Admin Area. Now all it needed was a name.
The first idea that sprang to mind was "Totem Post." The reasoning was that the posts were stacked one on top of another in a linear fashion, like a totem pole. Plus, totem poles are known for their creativity and diversity. However, not sure that users would "get it", Josh squeezed the words "Totem" and "Post" together and conceived "Toast Forums."
Josh decided that instead of keeping this creation to himself, he would share it with the internet community. He went to work on a website to display his project in November 2000. Originally, Toast Forums 1.0 was featured in a subdirectory of joshpainter.com, Josh's personal site. Over the next few months, traffic to joshpainter.com grew exponentially, all headed to the demo of Toast Forums. Josh realized that Toast needed its own home, and registered toastforums.com. In early 2001, he launched the new site along with a new version, Toast Forums 1.5. Over the next year and a half, over 25,000 copies were downloaded and installed on tens of thousands of websites.
Toast Forums was acquired by the Headrush Media team in early 2002. In September of 2002, deep into the development of Toast Forums 2.0, they decided to revisit Toast Forums 1.5 and fix some long-standing minor bugs. One thing led to another, and they ended up adding lots of performance improvements, a new skin, and an all new rich text editor. Now users could post messages with different fonts, colors and emoticons. Toast Forums 1.6 was launched in the middle of October 2002 along with a fresh new website.
Some time went on, and by the end of 2006, Headrush Media decided to seize their own development on ToastForums. Instead, the Danish developer Hans Henrik Appel (Appelsoft.com) acquired Toast Forums by January 2007.
All support and development is now being carried out by Hans Henrik Appel of Appelsoft.com.