Bulletin board
According to Maxthon International CEO Ming Jie "Jeff" Chen, Maxthon was based on MyIE, a popular modification created by Chinese programmer Changyou to customize Internet Explorer web browser. Changyou posted most of the source code for MyIE on his Bulletin board system before leaving the project in 2000. Chen then continued independently developing MyIE and in 2002 released a new version, MyIE2. Users around the world were quite active in contributing to MyIE2's development, adding many plug-ins, skins and assisting with debugging. MyIE2 was renamed Maxthon in 2003.