Yesterday Yahoo announced the launch of their new “suggestion boards.” Yahoo says that these new boards enable “you can browse suggestions from other site visitors or post your own. Digg-style voting means we can quickly discover what’s most important to users.” In fact, these have been live for a while, I specifically noticed the SiteExplorer Board at least a few months ago.

Techcrunch reports that many from the Digg community are upset with Yahoo over this announcement. The top level Digg message said that Yahoo “ripped off the Digg interface.” To be fair, Yahoo did give credit to Digg in their post and as Techcrunch explains the “purpose of the site [Yahoo Suggestion Boards] has nothing to do with finding and promoting news stories”

The current live Yahoo Suggestion Boards include: Answers, Autos, Autos Custom, My Yahoo!, Pipes, Real Estate, Site Explorer, Travel, TV, Upcoming.org, Yahoo! Developer Network, and Yahoo! Developer Network Gallery. More details at Yahoo Yodel.

This morning, I was searching for a specific Yahoo message board and came up with nothing, so I assumed it was not there. Then I see that Slashdot reported the message boards have been removed.

Yahoo informs us that they are “working on new ways for readers to comment on the news and participate in a discussion around it.”

Very weird that they would just pull it, as Slashdot logically says, “I can understand wanting to fix the boards so they’re more useful but to take them down for months before a replacement is released?”

But is this surprising? Yahoo has done the same thing by “temporarily” removing blog search, which has yet to come back to this date.