About HPDsoundoff

 

In the summer of 2000, HPOU placed a message board on its website for officers to post messages. Once officers started posting messages about local defense attorneys and city officials, the message board was removed because the union did not want to be responsible for any slander liability.

Officers Stacy Pierce and Vance Peterson (WS Patrol III at the time), simultaneously began working on getting another message board up and running. They looked at several messages boards and decided to go with  Yahoo Groups  -- HPDsoundoff was born!

The site was free and easy to use and served us well for a few years. Then we had a request from an "outsider" to join the site. When we rejected him as a member he became upset and worked on ways to derail the site. Members of the site began posting information about this "reject" on the site (which was for members only and password protected). All the info posted about the "reject" was public record info, so no laws or G.O.'s were broken.

Little did we know at the time, this "reject" was a Yahoo employee and had access to the site already, but couldn't post on the site. He read what was posted about him, contacted Yahoo, and they yanked the site from the Internet!

Several months went by and HPDsoundoff was still down. Stacy and Pete decided it would be best to have our own private site with our own domain name. That way, we wouldn't have to play by anyone's rules but our own.  Pete found a contact who developed a forum for the site and the individual gave him a crash course on how to run the site. HPDsoundoff was finally back on the Internet (HPDsoundoff.org).

The new site was great! We had total control over the contents and it was password protected.

In late August of 2005, HPDsoundoff.org went down. Numerous e-mails and phone calls were made to the company running the server, but they all went unanswered. We found out later that the company had gone out of business and didn't bother notifying anyone. HPDsoundoff was homeless once again.

On December 12, 2005, HPDsoundoff.com was started! The current forums section, developed by vBulletin, was chosen over many other message boards. vBulletin allows us to personalize the forums and the folks at vBulletin offer many ways to contact them for help and advice.

For the most part, the site has been running smoothly. We have had issues with the server (site running real slow), but those issues have been resolved.

HPDsoundoff thanks all the loyal members who have been with us from the start and stayed with us through the years. We also thank the newer members for signing-up and we hope all members continue to support the site as it develops into something bigger!

 

 

HPDsoundoff is not endorsed by the City of Houston, the Houston Police Department, or any particular employee organization.

Contents on this site do not reflect the opinion of all members of HPDsoundoff.

2006 by HPDsoundoff.  All right reserved

No part of this website, including the forums section, photos and graphics, may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, printing of pages or text, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of HPDsoundoff.