It's 'free'

You get what you pay for. The fact that it's free doesn't mean that you can't tell them that you're not happy about the format, or that you can't ask them to improve things. It does, however, give you very little bargaining power. You can leave, or you can keep littering the board with complaints, but those are the only options. There's no payment to withdraw, no subscription to cancel, and you can't fire the people responsible for it.

Even if it is true that we are providing LP with services -- current travel knowledge that they can use for their travel guides -- it is up to them to decide how valuable this forum is for them, how much money and manpower they want to invest in making it work. We can try to persuade them that we are very important to them, but the bottom line is that if they decide tomorrow that the Thorn Tree is more trouble than it's worth, they can shut it down and there's nothing we can do about it. We don't have a right to their services.

We can complain and tell them that the new format is headache inducing (which it is, IMHO), hard to use, and that essential features are missing; if LP decides that fixing it is worth it to keep us happy, they will fix it. But there are limits to what they will be willing to do. Running a website like this one is expensive, and apparently they have decided that they need, or in any case want, revenue from advertisements to offset the costs. Once again, we can tell them we don't like the format or whatever, and maybe they will change it to keep us happy, but they are free to do whatever they want with their website, just as we are free to do whatever we want on the internet. Nobody forces us to use the website. (And as an aside, I don't think calling LP "fascists" for using ads, as some people -- who evidently don't know the meaning of the word -- have done, is going to help much.)

I have absolutely nothing against the ads. They could have put an ad banner at the top and bottom and left all of the rest alone.

I reckon that people wouldn't turn to TT if they had to pay for it. We would find another place to go on-line and post.

Ads do bother me because they are too obvious and take up so much space on the screen.

I'm sure you already know that, but in case you don't : you can easily remove the third column (and restore the old full-page view) by following the instructions kindly given by midnight_toker on the India branch a few hours into the TT4 debacle. You'll have to use Firefox, which means this is not always an option, especially when on the road.

This is the thread.