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As I was looking through some HAIF posts from back in 2006, I came across several threads where it seemed the HAIF community was discovering itself or ourselves. It made me curious as to how HAIF sees itself today. I check in to HAIF sometimes several times a day via cell phone, pc and on occasion my kindle. I HAIF because I know I can depend on finding like-minded fans of Houston in at least a hundred different conversations at any given moment. I'm a HAIF geek. I never miss an opportunity to tout to others the wealth of information that can be found on HAIF. I entered the editor's world of HAIF before the crash of 2004 (i think it was '04). I discovered HAIF looking for photos of Houston's architecture, while putting my new Roadrunner cable modem to good use. In recent years, a coworker started telling me information about new developments in The Woodlands, information I knew was only being discussed on HAIF. When I asked her where she found this information, she told me it was HAIF. When I told her my username on HAIF, she about fell out of her chair. We had been working together for a few years and she frequently read my posts. She looked at me and said YOUR "BACHANON"?!!! It was so fun....... Why do you like HAIF? Do you have a story about connecting with HAIFers in the real world?

A couple of minor changes I've made to the forum: Removed the auto-import of the Texas Senators' voting records. They were actually just an experiment with RSS feeds when I started them years ago, and they never generated much interest. HAIF Photo Of The Day section has been eliminated in part because I don't have time to pick one photo each day to post, and I haven't found anyone else who is willing to take this on. Plus it's hard to pick just one great photo from the pool each day as there are so many of them. Added auto-import of photos posted to the HAIF Photo Pool on Flickr to the Photographing Houston section. It won't import everything, but should get a lot of stuff -- about 10 photos every 30 minutes. This I hope will expand the exposure of the HAIF photo pool to the greater HAIF population so that more people can see the great work being done there.

By now you should have noticed that we've upgraded the HAIF software once again. This isn't as jolting a change as the upgrade from 2009 that freaked everyone out. In fact, in a lot of ways this new system feels a lot like the old HAIF Classic system. At least the soothing blues are back. It's going to take me several days to sort through everything and tweak the software so it works best for our community, so expect some growing pains. If you have any requests or notice anything wrong or missing, just reply to this thread. I'll also use this thread to let everyone know about the new features. There are over 200 new ones, but a lot are behind-the-scenes. As I run across public-facing ones, I'll note them here. First, you may have noticed that Post Options has moved to the right side of the posting window. The whole posting experience is a lot cleaner now. You can also tag your posts with keywords. Some people like this. Some will ignore this. There is a ghosted arrow at the bottom of each page. It will reveal itself when you mouse over it, and clicking takes you to the top of the page. You can rate a topic with stars right above the topic title. Before we had reputation points based on +/- ratings of individual posts. Now you can "Like" a post and see who else likes certain posts. This is a HAIF-only "like" and is not part of Facebook. There are lots more features, so I'll keep posting stuff here. Let me know what you think of the new and improved HAIF.