Someone had asked about the history of Tech-Forums. Since we do not have a complete history posted anywhere I decided to do some digging and write one up. It is by no means exhaustive and i welcome anecdotes and additions in the comments.
Tech-Forums was originally created by Chopper on 1 March 2002. Chopper was also the very first registered member here on Tech-Forums, recorded on the same day. Since the site records do not show any other registrations until 12 March I am going to assume that Chopper had not opened the site up to the public until that time.
Chopper handled the admin duties as well as the upkeep on the site, laying it out and creating custom skins for it. There are some threads from that era where he lamented the fact that others stole his own custom forum designs as well as the entire forum layout.
On 19 April 2003 Chopper posted that he was considering selling Tech-Forums in order to concentrate on a different website. On 1 May Chopper announced that Larry was now the new owner of Tech-Forums; in actuality this was a co-ownership between Larry and his partner, Jack.
Under the new ownership the forums grew, helped by Larry's skills at search engine optimization. Unfortunately this period also became one of stagnation as Larry was held back by both the inactivity of Jack as well as Jack's refusal to put any money toward helping improve the site, only wanting his share of the income generated by the advertising on the site. Larry's long periods of absence also held back the forums, both during this time as well as later; some of these absences were due to business matters, but some were caused by his wife having cancer and by his daughter's medical problems.
On 21 February 2007 Larry made the announcement that he had just written out the check to buy out Jack's half of Tech-Forums. He also announced that he TF would be upgrading to the latest version of vBulletin (v.3) as well as the fact that he had installed scripts to import TF into it; the import was actually performed on 13 March and took much longer than expected and was a success although it also caused some major headaches for a week or two as well as some growing pains with the introduction of the infraction system. It was also at this time that Larry created the “/forums†for TF, making the main page a directory page… or something. This was left like this until sometime in 2012 when it was finally put out of our misery.
Tech-Forums changed hands once again in December of 2011, when Larry sold the site to Andy R. Andy is an old hand at forums and owns several as part of his company, Social Knowledge LLC. The change of ownership brought some changes to TF such as rolling vBulletin back to v.3 so as to be on the same framework as other Social Knowledge sites as well as the addition of several Social Knowledge team members to help maintain the site.
Tech-Forums was originally created by Chopper on 1 March 2002. Chopper was also the very first registered member here on Tech-Forums, recorded on the same day. Since the site records do not show any other registrations until 12 March I am going to assume that Chopper had not opened the site up to the public until that time.
Chopper handled the admin duties as well as the upkeep on the site, laying it out and creating custom skins for it. There are some threads from that era where he lamented the fact that others stole his own custom forum designs as well as the entire forum layout.
On 19 April 2003 Chopper posted that he was considering selling Tech-Forums in order to concentrate on a different website. On 1 May Chopper announced that Larry was now the new owner of Tech-Forums; in actuality this was a co-ownership between Larry and his partner, Jack.
Under the new ownership the forums grew, helped by Larry's skills at search engine optimization. Unfortunately this period also became one of stagnation as Larry was held back by both the inactivity of Jack as well as Jack's refusal to put any money toward helping improve the site, only wanting his share of the income generated by the advertising on the site. Larry's long periods of absence also held back the forums, both during this time as well as later; some of these absences were due to business matters, but some were caused by his wife having cancer and by his daughter's medical problems.
On 21 February 2007 Larry made the announcement that he had just written out the check to buy out Jack's half of Tech-Forums. He also announced that he TF would be upgrading to the latest version of vBulletin (v.3) as well as the fact that he had installed scripts to import TF into it; the import was actually performed on 13 March and took much longer than expected and was a success although it also caused some major headaches for a week or two as well as some growing pains with the introduction of the infraction system. It was also at this time that Larry created the “/forums†for TF, making the main page a directory page… or something. This was left like this until sometime in 2012 when it was finally put out of our misery.
Tech-Forums changed hands once again in December of 2011, when Larry sold the site to Andy R. Andy is an old hand at forums and owns several as part of his company, Social Knowledge LLC. The change of ownership brought some changes to TF such as rolling vBulletin back to v.3 so as to be on the same framework as other Social Knowledge sites as well as the addition of several Social Knowledge team members to help maintain the site.
.
