In recent months the discussions on Around Dublin have become more lively than the Around Dublin Team had ever anticipated. Unfortunately the default comment management system provided by Google’s Blogger, our publishing platform of choice, seems insufficient at fully supporting the active debates on Around Dublin. Our primary mission has been and will continue to be updating residents and prospective home buyers on all the exciting developments currently in or coming to Dublin; however, we also recognize the need for an online forum for all the stakeholders to share their opinions, perspectives, and insights on popular issues that impact our quality of life in this emerald city of Northern California. To that end, we have created a new website called Dublin Townhall. While Around Dublin will strive to remain neutral in its presentation of facts, the articles on Dublin Townhall will typically have a particular point of view. We hope most of our readers will see Dublin Townhall as a logical extension to Around Dublin and join in on the conversations there.

Unlike Around Dublin, Dublin Townhall uses a third-party comment management system called Disqus to facilitate the discussions. Disqus enables direct response to comments via an intuitive user interface; it allows comment rating the same way Yelp lets users vote on other reviews; and it even supports video comments. For those who would like to see Disqus in action, please check out the Harvard Crimson. As in a real-time public forum, Dublin Townhall will require discussion participants to identify themselves. Dublin Townhall will accept all the comments through Disqus, but only registered Disqus users, readers with Facebook accounts, and visitors with one of the accepted logins in a ClickPass-mediated process will be able to contribute directly to the comment threads. Anonymous comments will be read by Dublin Townhall’s site administrator, but they will not appear on the discussion threads. Dublin Townhall will rely on the community to decide whether or not a comment is pertinent to a discussion thread. Once a comment has received a net score beyond an arbitrary threshold, it will be hidden from view. That threshold is currently set at -15, but we will adjust it based on the number of daily visitors Dublin Townhall gets.

The ownership model of comments on Dublin Townhall is significantly different from that on Around Dublin. With the sophisticated infrastructure provided by Disqus, commenters on Dublin Townhall ultimately own the comments they author. For those who would like to learn more about Disqus’s revolutionary perspective on comment ownership, please read their blog post titled A Commenter’s Rights. The Around Dublin Team is very excited about the potential of Dublin Townhall, and we are confident many community activists and local thought leaders will emerge from this public forum in time. Thank you for your continued support, and we look forward to seeing you on Dublin Townhall. Happy New Year!