INTERNET perverts hijacked an innocent parish council website and used it as a messageboard of filth.

The Copmanthorpe Parish Council website discussion forum was meant to encourage residents of the leafy south York village to discuss local issues.

But instead of using the site as an innocent forum for debating village news, one user simply left a web link to a grim pornography site advertising "reality mature sex" with "older women". The site includes explicit photography and detailed descriptions of sex acts.

Another user, styling themselves "Kraska", also posted a link to a mysterious Russian site.

Parish council chairman Mike Irwin said he was shocked such material could have found its way on to the parish council website.

He said he had now managed to remove the offending links after first discovering the problem about a month ago.

"I don't want members of the village who are perhaps simply looking for information to be confronted with this nonsense - especially young people," he said.

"If we're going to get this sort of behaviour I'm going to dismantle the whole site."

The discussion forum has now been temporarily closed.

Tom Bradbury, of York web development firm Amistoso - which set up the Copmanthorpe site and discussion forum about two years ago - said all websites were open to such material being posted on them.

"It can happen to any website that's got any kind of public forum," he explained. "It happens every day on millions of message boards.

"The important thing is that there's someone there to keep an eye on it. That's not our job."

He said the company could look into ways of screening out potentially risky users, adding that a full-time web administrator would be able to monitor the site to prevent the situation from reoccurring.

The Reverend Maurice Staton, a member of the parish council, said he was appalled that people could invade the website.

"It's extremely alarming that this can happen," he said.

"Here we are trying to do a service to the community, trying to advertise what we're doing and we're running up against problems like this. It doesn't do my confidence in websites any good at all."

Updated: 10:09 Tuesday, February 08, 2005