As I usually do at night, I went to the Town of Briistol's web site to check their message board to see what's going on 'up North'. Much to my surprise, things have changed, dramatically, and in my opinion for the worse. Gone is the simple home-town message board where people could freely and easily have discussions about their Town. In it's place is a fancy, and extremely commercial message board hosted on another site. That not being bad enough, but this site is full of advertisements and pop-up windows with yet more advertisements. That again not being bad enough, this site is chock full of banner ads with links to such notorious companies like Double-Click, who are famous for tracking the whereabouts of on-line users and selling all collected information to anyone who wants it! And you can't use the message board unless you allow this commercial abuse of the internet and our privacy! My firewall went crazy blocking all the ads, cookies, java applets, pop-ups, etc just trying to get to the message board. Granted, the average user wouldn't notice much, until their mail box starts filling with junk mail! But I take precautions beforehand and watch for such abuses.

No thank you! I'm sorry to see the free message board go. I'm sorry Bristol has been suckered into the dark commercial side of the internet. And I'm sorry I will no longer be able to participate in the communications of Bristol residents... There are a lot of nice poeple up there and I will miss them... If we're lucky, maybe some of them will come here to visit? They will always be welcome, and they will never have to worry about the commercial abuse or their privacy here!