Coastsider’s Town Hall is open.

Town Hall is an open forum where Coastsiders can start their own discussion topics.  Posts on Town Hall will not be reviewed before they are released. This should result in a faster and more open exchange of ideas than you can get in any other forum on the Coastside.

I’ve wanted to set up an open forum for some time and it was one of my main motivations for upgrading Coastsider’s software this summer. Sometimes people are reluctant to post their notes and questions to Coastsider because they aren’t sure what’s news. Town Hall is designed to lower the barriers that keep our neighbors from posting.

Once you’re logged on to Coastsider, you’re also logged on to Town Hall. Anyone can read posts in Town Hall. But to write a post, you will have to use your real name on your Coastsider profile and request access.

Although your posts will not be reviewed before they’re published, Town Hall will be monitored. We expect all Town Hall users to follow Coastsider’s Terms of Use. You are expected to treat other Coastsider readers with civility, and not to post content that is illegal, threatening, abusive, defamatory, pornographic, deceptive, false, misleading, or disruptive. Spirited discussion is expected, but so is civility.

We’ve been working on Town Hall since the beginning of summer, and have been beta testing it for weeks. We’re very excited to open it to the public. If you have any unexpected problems, post a message here, or just email me using the link to my profile in any of my Town Hall posts.