The report of my FTH’s death was an exaggeration! (with apologies to Mark Twain)

The purpose of this blog post is to provide an overview of recent and ongoing efforts by the FTH team to ensure this service can meet the needs of Toastmasters Clubs.

1. Bug Fixes and incremental improvements
2. Why is my site down?
3. FTH Ambassadors on the forums
4. FTH Documentation
5. Question: What on Earth is a Joomla?
6. FreeToastHost is invigorating this blog!
7. If a picture is worth 1000 words, how much is a video worth?
8. Live learning sessions
9. What’s Happening Next?

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January 2026 is the 22nd Birthday of Free Toast Host (FTH)! This free service for Toastmasters clubs was founded in 2004 by Dr Bo Bennett, DTM, PHD Social Scientist. The platform has been through a couple rounds of major updates over the years; FTH2 in August 2011 and FTH3 in August 2018.

Bug Fixes and incremental improvements

The years following the introduction of FTH3 in 2018 have seen numerous incremental updates and fixes to various site functions.

Your support requests on the forums help more than you might realize. Various forum topics reveal something that isn’t working quite right, broken or generally needs a little bump. Occasionally a forum topic will indirectly lead the FTH team to discover a necessary correction.

Why is my site down?

In recent months our clubs have seen increased problems with sites being down or loading very slow. FTH Admin continuously responds to these outages with various tweaks and changes to a multitude of server functions. This topic has its own story in the FTH Blog;

https://support.toastmastersclubs.org/blog/battle-of-bots

FTH Ambassadors on the forums

If you watch the behavior of FTH Admin & Ambassadors on the public forums you might get the impression that we randomly jump in and out of topics.

This behavior has an easy explanation; We DO randomly jump in and out of topics!

The various and continuously changing availability of the volunteer FTH team members makes a tag-team approach on the forums the most effective way to resolve most support issues. We can jump in and add additional detail or recognize something that one of us missed or misunderstood. The following topic is a good example of this;

https://support.toastmastersclubs.org/kunena-2025-02-09/support-requests/38110-more-link-in-meeting-agenda-module-broken?start=0

The FTH team members reside in multiple time zones thus expanding overall availability for forum responses.

While the FTH response to one-on-one support requests is usually to use the forums (for the above reason), it can’t hurt to ask! Some FTH ambassadors are occasionally available to hop on a thread and try to help with your FTH site issue.

FTH Documentation

Our responses on the forums often point to a document for two primary reasons;

1. Each club should know how to use their site.
2. We like to avoid devoting time to site usage descriptions that already exist in the document library.

The FTH team regularly checks documents against site function and makes corrections. Sometimes the nature of how a help topic discussion progresses leads to document adjustments.

The last document improvement suggestion (as of the date of this blog post) was over 4 years ago! We’re running around the Ambassador Lounge bragging about what great and perfect authors we are. Please dig into the document library, fiddle with your site then head over to Documentation Feedback and knock us down a peg!

https://support.toastmastersclubs.org/kunena-2025-02-09/documentation-feedback

Question: What on Earth is a Joomla?

The FTH support forums recently underwent a major overhaul of the CMS (Content Management System) which is the software platform that defines how this support site and forums look and behave. There may still be loose ends to tie down so if you notice something that doesn’t seem quite right with how this support forum works please let us know on the General Discussion forum.

https://support.toastmastersclubs.org/kunena-2025-02-09/general-discussion

Answer: Joomla is the name of the CMS (Content Management System) used by FreeToastHost support.

FreeToastHost is invigorating this blog! 

Previously I mentioned that we often point to the document library in response to support topics.

How each club prefers to manage our club sites often requires multiple documents and a deeper understanding of FTH functionality. Among other topics, this blog is a resource that can contain descriptions of FTH usage that benefits from a multitude of documents.

Which leads us to...

If a picture is worth 1000 words, how much is a video worth?

FreeToastHost is in the beginning stages of including how-to videos in our support documentation.

For this we have to thank FTH Ambassador peterb323! Peter’s enthusiastic expertise is expanding FTH to this exciting new dynamic method of supporting Toastmasters clubs!

What do you want? What do you need? Feel free to share your ideas for the types of videos that will help you provide the best FTH site for your club.

Live learning sessions

In addition to how-to videos, watch for announcements for live video help and learning sessions hosted by Peter.

What’s Happening Next?

In the fall of 2025 the FTH team reviewed our public forum called  “Improvement Suggestions”. This forum is where our Toastmasters clubs can make suggestions of how FTH can better serve you.

We accumulated and summarized the entire history of Improvement Suggestions to understand what Toastmasters clubs want and need from their FTH site.

 

The FTH team undertook this effort to lay the groundwork for the development of FTH4!

 

Some of the overall improvements we wish to accomplish;

• Better mobile response & formatting.
• Comprehensive attendance options for hybrid meetings.
• More effective calendar options and management.
• Agenda configurations.
• Multiple agenda management.
• Expanded and customizable payment options in the dues module.
• Recoding of background processes for better response and future upgrades.
• Numerous minor tweaks and improvements throughout all modules.

The entire volunteer FTH team is here because we enjoy providing this service to Toastmasters clubs around the world.

Please engage us on all of the public forums! FreeToastHost strives to provide club websites to serve as the best possible face for our clubs!

During October-November 2025, the FreeToastHost club and district websites had frequent episodes of being either inaccessible or extremely slow to load.

This was caused by several different things:

• inefficiencies in the database operations
• large amounts of unwanted traffic from hackers and poorly-behaved search engine and AI bots
• There was also the Amazon AWS outage on 20 October 2025. FTH uses Amazon servers in the US-EAST-1 region, where it all started. Obviously, this one was out of our control but was still very frustrating.

The ones under our control have been addressed and currently the sites are working well.

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