Firstly, let me apologize if you got the wrong impression from my previous reply. That certainly was not the intention and if it came across that way I'm sorry.
The bulletin boards are a solution to the fact that Governors wanted a town crier like tool. Rather than have Governor messages mixed in with Event Moderator and Global Announcements, we provided the same functionality in gump form. A means to blast an announcement and short supporting blurb to advertise the goings on within the City.
I'm going to respectfully disagree with you that communication cannot be one way. An announcement, which the bulletin boards are intended to promote, are one way communications that are often not open to reply. That being said, I agree with you that we need better two way communication in general. I think that has been a shortcoming within the game for a long time. In lieu of a more elegant and complete solution, people rely on various out of game means of two way communication (ICQ I think being the most popular) to fill the long standing lack of an in game alternative.
The previous "guestbook" had a limited amount of text that could be included in any message and didn't fulfill what I think we ultimately need to provide - an in game guest book for anyone to post and receive replies. Dot mentioned the old school guest books in which it functioned similar to a thread style. Unfortunately that has become deprecated over the years and with advances in tech I'm sure we can find a more elegant and functional solution.
If, for some reason, citizens do not want to communicate with their Governor via an out of game means, or the Governor isn't comfortable sharing those details they can always drop a book with a much lengthier message on the City Herald. It was mentioned that the name of the person who deposited the item to the City Herald isn't available - that's another item we can add to the future Governor enhancement list.
As always, thanks for the feedback!