Hello Dream Home Bloggers! We’re all very excited about the upcoming 15th anniversary of the HGTV Dream Home in scenic Stowe, VT. I want to thank everyone for keeping up their interest and enthusiasm, even in the “off season”.  We really appreciate that the discussions on here continue to go on, even when there isn’t a whole lot of news to talk about.  In the 3+ years since we started this blog, a real community has formed here.

Now onto the business at hand.  In recent weeks, there has been some discourse within our communities and we’ve notice the amount of inappropriate and inflammatory comments continue to rise.  In order to curb some of that, starting today we are removing the ability to comment anonymously.

What does that mean for you?
It means that you will need to login in order to comment on this blog as well as the Green Home blog.

Login with what?
If you haven’t already done so, you will need to create an account with either Intense Debate, the comment system we use here on the blog, or with WordPress, the software we use to power the blogs.

Where can I register?
If you’d like an account just to post comments, you can sign-up with Intense Debate at http://intensedebate.com/signup.  Many popular sites and blogs are now using Intense Debate across the web, and you will be able to use this same account across all of them.  If you’d like to try your hand at writing your own blog, register with WordPress at http://en.wordpress.com/signup/ and use your credentials from there as your login.

What are the benefits of registering with Intense Debate? Creating an account lets you:

• - Upload a profile picture
• - Build your reputation score
• - Keep track of all your comments
• - Vote on comments
• - Receive email notifications when new comments are posted

What happened to Twitter and Facebook? We’re working with Intense Debate to see if that is an option.  Currently, logging with your Twitter or Facebook accounts is only available when anonymous commenting is allowed.  If we can find a way to turn either of these back on without turning anonymous commenting back on, we will definitely do so.

Hello Dream Home fans!  It looks like some of you keen eyed readers have already discovered this, but I wanted to formally announce some of the upgrades we made around here recently.  This morning we added the Intense Debate application to all of our HGTV blogs.  There are a bunch of new features to the comments area that Intense Debate brings to the table.  You’ll notice that comments are now paginated as well as being threaded.  Hopefully this will alleviate some of the confusion we have where the page scrolls on for days and days.  You can also subscribe to posts by email, as well as comment by email.  It also adds the ability to report individual posts to us.

You’ll notice a few login options at the bottom of the page.  You can login with an Intense Debate account, created at http://intensedebate.com/signup, your Facebook account, a Twitter account, or OpenID.  We’ve also gone ahead and left the old method of posting, you just have to supply the same fields as always – Name, Email and an optional website.

Our hope is that all of these features will let all of your take your already passionate comments to the next level.

Please leave any questions, concerns or feedback below.

~ Chad P
HGTV Community Guy