Howls at AOL

America Online thought it would be easier for its 12 million members to partake in online commerce if it shut down all buying and selling activity on its 500 message boards and moved it to its classified advertising area.

“We’re committed to make our service as intuitive as possible, and that means putting things where members would expect to find them,” said AOL spokesman Tom Ziemba. “For buying and selling, that’s the classified area.”

But for thousands of AOL members, the switch is not that simple. Hobbyists who use the message boards say the change threatens to kill their online communities. They worry that their offers to buy and sell items ranging from Beanie Babies to military memorabilia will be lost in a sea of classified listings. What’s more, they’ll have to pay $9.95 to post messages if the item offered for sale costs more than $100.

AOL said the change was designed to flush businesses out of the hobby-oriented message boards. But disgruntled members said they suspect the company was merely looking for a way to make more money.

“We are feeling violated,” said Scott Alexander, a frustrated AOL member in Encino who trades G.I. Joe action figures and model railroad cars online. “It is definitely making me rethink why I’m there.”

Alexander and others have signed an online petition and sent e-mail to AOL Chief Executive Steve Case. Ziemba acknowledged that the company did “a bad job up front of communicating to members what this was all about.” AOL responded by adding links between the message boards and the classified section and allowing people to buy and sell on the message boards through the end of June, a month longer than originally planned.