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IMDb to imminently shut, then delete, all of its message boards

Started by Ambient Sheep, February 04, 2017, 04:12:37 AM

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Ambient Sheep

Hello peeps.

Well the title says it mostly about this minor-ish act of cultural vandalism, but just to fill in the missing details, the boards are being made read-only as I speak (Fri 3rd February 2017).  Are they then going to at least leave them up in perpetuity, so people can reference them in years to come?

Well no, of course not.

Are they going to give people, say, six months to download any content they want?

Nah, bollocks to that.

You get two weeks.

On February 19th, they're going to be nuked for good, along with the ability to PM other users on there.  Sixteen years' worth of people's thoughts and opinions on films, gone forever.

Sure, there was quite a lot of crap and "THIS MOVIE SUCKED!" but there was occasionally some real gems in there.  After a few years where I hardly watched anything, I've started watching a lot of films again recently and have thoroughly enjoyed wading through those forums to see what people had said about stuff from years back.[nb]Yes, I do come here, but sadly I've tended to find very little about stuff I've seen, possibly because much of it predates the founding of this subforum.[/nb]  I'd even thought about signing up myself to contribute.  Guess that won't be happening.

Source for this bollocks news:
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/17/02/03/2258244/imdb-is-shutting-down-its-long-running-popular-message-boards-after-16-years
and the official announcement, if you can stomach it, is here:
http://www.imdb.com/board/announcement

Some comments on Slashdot that I agree with:

QuoteThat's half the usefulness of IMDB gone then, as the message boards were the perfect place to look for discussion of obscurities you noticed while watching something.

QuoteDeliberately crapified? No, no, no, it's an enhancement*:

"As part of our ongoing effort to continually evaluate and enhance the customer experience on IMDb, we have decided to disable IMDb's message boards"

* brought to you by Alternative Facts Inc.

QuoteThey're shooting themselves in the foot. I think they underestimate what a sense of community means to overall traffic. No message boards, no community, no loyalty to imdb as a site and that "small but passionate" userbase will eventually begin to coalesce somewhere else followed shortly by the general public.

QuoteI have been reading the IMDB forums for about 15 years, and will greatly mourn their passing. I'd often head there after watching an older film, as users would have nearly always posted some interesting facts or retrospectives. The long-running thread about Blade Runner's impact on movies and culture at large was particularly fun.

QuoteWTF?? I liked the message boards a lot. They gave a bit of insight into the movies and characters you wouldn't get otherwise. Also, if you read a message board in a movie that came out a couple years ago you can see how the messages change from before the movie came out to afterwards.

QuoteIf you watched a film and didn't understand part of the plot, found something unrealistic, or particularly enjoyed something, you could head to the IMDB forums and almost always find a discussion about what you wanted to know.

and most of all:

QuoteI was literally just researching some films in the discussion boards. When you're looking up obscure films, the decade and a half of expertise that is buried in the comments and stories that people have — often by family members and friends of the cast and crew— are invaluable. Also useful are the tangential comments and links that take you from one title to another via the comments.

It was often just good reading.

Let's not be dramatic. This is not the burning of the library of Alexandria, but it's a unique resource and as someone said above, there's nothing close to a replacement in site. And if there was, there'd be no reason to go to it because it doesn't link from anything, or to anything.

They could at least zip up the archives and post them to the torrents for posterity. On the basis of killing off the comments, in my estimation, they've cut out a huge reason for me to visit their site.

This is shit news.


Is it possible that this is just a way to drastically eliminate the possibility of people writing libelous stuff right underneath an industry professional's most frequently viewed profile?

greenman

It wasn't quite so extreme but Rotten Tomatoes greatly side-lined its forums a few years ago as well. the cynical view you could take I'd say is that users abilities to post negative reviews of films limits a sites advertising income potential.

Twed


Uncle TechTip

There was a guardian article recently about the expense of maintaining moderated message boards, for very little return, newspaper sites all over are canning theirs. That could be a good argument but doesn't justify not leaving it read only. I expect it's tied up with an upgrade to the site and they haven't even coded a comment facility.

Noodle Lizard

Don't most of the IMDb message boards get cleared out after a while of inactivity anyway?

Small Man Big Horse

Quote from: Uncle TechTip on February 04, 2017, 09:35:10 AM
There was a guardian article recently about the expense of maintaining moderated message boards, for very little return, newspaper sites all over are canning theirs. That could be a good argument but doesn't justify not leaving it read only. I expect it's tied up with an upgrade to the site and they haven't even coded a comment facility.

Yeah I read that, and a couple of others on that subject, it's disappointing to see. But like you say, there's no need why it can't be read only at all.

Quote from: Noodle Lizard on February 04, 2017, 09:48:46 AM
Don't most of the IMDb message boards get cleared out after a while of inactivity anyway?

Not that I've noticed, a cursory skim just now led to some boards with posts which date back to 2005 without any inactivity.

I'm really disappointed by this news as well. Like Sheepy says there was a lot of "This movie sucks lolz" posts but also a lot of really interesting info on various films, and it was a great aid in tracking down some actors who have all but disappeared.

BritishHobo

There's definitely regular clearout, always relative to the business of a particular board. A hugely active board that gets new posts every minute will only go back a few weeks, whereas a board that gets very little can go back over a decade. I posted daily on that site for years and years, on so many different message boards, to the point where sometimes my post history would number in near triple figures for pages; I've not posted since 2015, and not regularly since 2011, and my post history has dwindled down to four-and-a-half pages, made up entirely of posts on films and TV shows that are either obscure, or were only briefly big enough to have a temporarily busy message board.

It's weird. Until this announcement, I'd forgotten about the IMDb message boards, how often I used to use them, and what an impact they've actually had on me, in various ways. From stupid, small stuff (like where I came up with the stupid Hobo username I use everywhere now), to actually having several real-life, real-world friends, people I've met up with and formed lasting relationships with that I never would have expected. It genuinely meant a lot to me, I was active in a lot of communities on a lot of different boards - Back to the Future, Doctor Who, Friends, Resident Evil 4, The Hunger Games. Almost none of which I even care about now, but the community spirit is what sticks in my mind. Even apart from that, I always found something really thrilling in being on a board in the wake of release; following a film's discussion board in the week after it came out, or a TV show's in the wake of a new episode (LOST's board was fucking incredible in the days after the finale), or even just the busier General Discussion forums. For a message board with such a creaky and dilapidated interface, it felt genuinely alive and busy. It did form a huge part of my early internet browsing and my life, it helped form the way I write and discuss with people online, and I'm properly, unexpectedly sad to see it go. I'll fucking miss it.

That said - all that said - the IMDb message boards were absolute fucking gash. They were a total pit of aggressive bores with no concept of how to have an interesting, engaging discussion, and could not have been less interested in entertaining any opinion that was even fractionally distinct from their own. The sheer volume of posts meant that most boards with a community would be swamped with people bellowing 'THIS WAS AWFUL AND IF YOU LIKED IT YOU'RE RETARDED' or 'STUPID IDIOT HATERS DON'T UNDERSTAND HOW GOOD THIS IS' at each other. Barely a topic could go by without somebody taking umbrage at even the most harmless opinion expressed in the original post and immediately dragging the whole discussion into an utterly pointless flame war. It was basically a breeding ground for trolling, and to be fair to it, it remains the place where I've seen some of the funniest examples of the original use of the term, people saying intentionally stupid and inflammatory things to wind up fans of whatever film or show the board was dedicated to. The problem was that pretty much every other post was someone saying stupid and inflammatory things not to wind people up, but because they genuinely thought shouting their aggressively-formed opinion into the void was worth splurging so much time on.

They were a total cesspit, a gaping wound of pointless spats and insults, and the ever-increasing number of message boards due to the ever-increasing number of films and TV shows means I couldn't blame IMDb less for deciding to just toss a grenade down the hole and seal it off. In fact I'm surprised they didn't do it a decade ago. The IMDb boards suck, and I'm glad they're dead. But I'll miss 'em.

biggytitbo

Quote from: Monsieur Verdoux on February 04, 2017, 04:34:29 AM
Is it possible that this is just a way to drastically eliminate the possibility of people writing libelous stuff right underneath an industry professional's most frequently viewed profile?


Moderating message boards is becoming a massive liability for any large site these days. if you do it properly it's incredibly expensive, and I imagine for a site as huge as IMDB it must be an enormous drain.


At the very least though, they could leave the archives ones up.

Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth

They're throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

The baby would have grown up to be Hitler though. And the bathwater was filled with piss.

hewantstolurkatad

Quote from: Noodle Lizard on February 04, 2017, 09:48:46 AM
Don't most of the IMDb message boards get cleared out after a while of inactivity anyway?
Nope, they clear out posts if they fall behind like ten pages of other posts but otherwise they'll be hanging around forever. This is for the individual film and actor boards, never was on the more general ones.



Stunned imdb didn't do this years ago tbh. Every actress just had tons of threads about why people would or wouldn't fuck them, every teen (and sometimes younger) had "ARE THEY EIGHTEEN YET?!" threads. The discussion of any at all challenging film tended to have heaps of "THIS FILM SUCKS" threads and fuck all else.

biggytitbo

Yeah I wouldnt be surprised if they decided to shut them down after spending a morning actually reading them.

purlieu

Quote from: BritishHobo on February 04, 2017, 12:02:01 PMThat said - all that said - the IMDb message boards were absolute fucking gash. They were a total pit of aggressive bores with no concept of how to have an interesting, engaging discussion, and could not have been less interested in entertaining any opinion that was even fractionally distinct from their own. The sheer volume of posts meant that most boards with a community would be swamped with people bellowing 'THIS WAS AWFUL AND IF YOU LIKED IT YOU'RE RETARDED' or 'STUPID IDIOT HATERS DON'T UNDERSTAND HOW GOOD THIS IS' at each other. Barely a topic could go by without somebody taking umbrage at even the most harmless opinion expressed in the original post and immediately dragging the whole discussion into an utterly pointless flame war. It was basically a breeding ground for trolling, and to be fair to it, it remains the place where I've seen some of the funniest examples of the original use of the term, people saying intentionally stupid and inflammatory things to wind up fans of whatever film or show the board was dedicated to. The problem was that pretty much every other post was someone saying stupid and inflammatory things not to wind people up, but because they genuinely thought shouting their aggressively-formed opinion into the void was worth splurging so much time on.

They were a total cesspit, a gaping wound of pointless spats and insults, and the ever-increasing number of message boards due to the ever-increasing number of films and TV shows means I couldn't blame IMDb less for deciding to just toss a grenade down the hole and seal it off. In fact I'm surprised they didn't do it a decade ago. The IMDb boards suck, and I'm glad they're dead. But I'll miss 'em.
This. Whenever I've watched a film I pop it onto my Watchlist on IMDB and rate it, and occasionally check out reviews and discussion if I think there are intriguing or confusing elements, and so many threads are just full of people yelling at each other. I've never come across a more hostile message board. It's worse than the comments sections on newspaper sites.

Yesterday I was trying to skip past some nutter posting on almost every thread of the Breaking the Waves forum about the film promoting Satanism and how the film is about the main character being tricked by Satan (what?!), when I noticed the closure announcement at the top of the page, and I just thought "yeah, makes sense".

There is a lot of really fascinating stuff in there though, and it does seem a tremendous shame that there won't be an official archive - especially, as has been pointed out, on less active pages where the threads go back years. I'm sure someone's going about doing it though.

The one real loss of the thread culling on active pages was the '100 Things I Learned From The Happening' thread, which was comedy gold.

Blumf

Does this include the user reviews? Never bothered with the commends/discussion bit, but the reviews were handy for getting a grip on lesser known films that aren't mentioned elsewhere on the web.

BlodwynPig

It's like in the 70s when the Government burned down all old ladies fences and the conversations just stopped.

mothman

You'd think they'd at least keep the "What film is this?" boatrd, that's been bloody useful on occasion. Though I guess places like Reddit are just as good - you'd think, though nobody there's ever identified anything I've asked about. The Book subR is mindboggling, people mostly asking help identifying Young Adult books they can't have read more than about a year ago, given their apparent ages - and how recent most of the books that do get identified are...

Steven

Rotten Tomatoes has a woeful interface.. you can't select how many titles to display per page and have to scroll down their piss-slow page and click an arrow at the bottom which then takes ages to load more titles, rinse and repeat, and half the time you accidentally click on the arrow and since it's loading it replaces it with a title and takes you to that page and wham.. you've lost where you were down the list. Sometimes I've gone down that page for hundreds of titles and lost me place. I this thread is about IMDb, but it's shit enough to warrant moaning about here. Fucking shite.

Dropshadow

It's probably best to think of this as something being put out of its misery. Those forums were awful. They made Yahoo Answers look like the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Icehaven

I didn't even know Imdb had message boards, I've only ever used it to look up what else I've seen him in, how long has she been 39, what year that came out and what else they did after they were in that. Also is that his voice in that cartoon, is that her 30 years ago, and my particular favourite, settling an argument between two blokes at work when one swore up and down that Leonardo Di Caprio was very briefly in Pulp Fiction as one of the men in the house that John Travolta and Samuel L Jackson shoot (he isn't.)

Brundle-Fly

Those message boards were always ruined by bickering, trolling and general misogyny. Shame really, as there was also good input too. I had a lot of plots explained to me over the years because I'm a bit thick when it comes to following some movie storylines. Who was the one armed Norwegian man in the Sedan again?

There was always somebody asking if there was any nudity or scenes of a sexual nature in the film. Just read the Parents Guide, you div.

blue reel

The BBC World Service is currently running a piece, an interview with an American whose name I did not catch.

The interviewee is claiming that one of the reasons the IMDB boards are being closed is due to the casual access to murder-for-hire/contract killings/hiring of hitmen.

The whole world is living in fantasy land, and message boards certainly bear the brunt of the non-stop barrage of nonsense.  While it is a shame to see IMDB go, it is comforting to know the BBC will continue to shout out other folk's nonsense without a first thought.

The standards of professional contract killers has really reached a new low. I suppose next will be a direct-mailing campaign.

Shit Good Nose

#21
Quote from: greenman on February 04, 2017, 04:40:49 AM
It wasn't quite so extreme but Rotten Tomatoes greatly side-lined its forums a few years ago as well. the cynical view you could take I'd say is that users abilities to post negative reviews of films limits a sites advertising income potential.

But in RT's case it was only because the site was bought by IGN, who were very open early on about the fact that they didn't really want a functioning film forum and wanted the site to concentrate on games and new movie releases only.  This IMDB business is a different beast altogether.

That being said, the IMDB message boards are, in my opinion, worthless.  Any bits of interesting trivia, goofs, technical stuff etc are always added to the official notes for the film anyway and, I assume, that will continue.  The rest of it is indeed total gash.  Far from cultural vandalism, I think this is a long overdue clearing out of 16 years worth of cunt words - being a VERY early adopter of IMDB as a reference tool (thanks to living in Bristol myself at the time, I became aware of it as Col Needham frequently made the local news with it), I can count on, probably, one hand the genuinely interesting threads that I've seen in there.  Place is like a fucking playground full of hateful people, and always has been.  The film discussion is FAR more interesting on CaB, and that's (/this is) just a sub-forum of the main site, which is frequented by relatively few people.

Good riddance.

steveh

There are still a number of obscure films I come across for which the only content at all is on the related message board entry. It's a shame for those that they can't be bothered to employ someone transfer the useful stuff into user reviews or trivia.

billyandthecloneasaurus

My mate revealed recently that he met his first proper girlfriend on the IMDb message boards, which I found quite sweet.  When he explained that it was a roleplaying Friends thread, with everyone actually pretending to be characters from Friends I cried with laughter.  For that reason alone I'm quite sad about this, but whenever I browsed the boards myself I thought it was full of idiots talking shite to be honest.

Dr Rock

They are chaotic and full of trolls if it's a Marvel movie or Star Wars - but pretty handy, informed and interesting for artier stuff, or Film Noirs etc. Shame to see them go for those type of films. 

Noodle Lizard

Quote from: billyandthecloneasaurus on February 08, 2017, 10:34:31 AM
My mate revealed recently that he met his first proper girlfriend on the IMDb message boards, which I found quite sweet.  When he explained that it was a roleplaying Friends thread, with everyone actually pretending to be characters from Friends I cried with laughter.

Jesus Christ!

marquis_de_sad

Quote from: billyandthecloneasaurus on February 08, 2017, 10:34:31 AM
My mate revealed recently that he met his first proper girlfriend on the IMDb message boards, which I found quite sweet.  When he explained that it was a roleplaying Friends thread, with everyone actually pretending to be characters from Friends I cried with laughter.

I'd like to have seen the moment they met in real life. "Excuse me... Are you 'Gunther'?"

Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth

Quote from: marquis_de_sad on February 08, 2017, 06:18:05 PM
I'd like to have seen the moment they met in real life. "Excuse me... Are you 'Gunther'?"
"Ugly Fat Naked Guy?"

purlieu

Quote from: Dr Rock on February 08, 2017, 12:07:10 PM
They are chaotic and full of trolls if it's a Marvel movie or Star Wars - but pretty handy, informed and interesting for artier stuff, or Film Noirs etc.
I dunno, I've found a lot of "this was the worst film ever" / "totally pointless and boring", countered with "you're too much of an idiot to get it, shut up" in artier film boards on there.

Steven

Quote from: purlieu on February 09, 2017, 12:00:40 AM
I dunno, I've found a lot of "this was the worst film ever" / "totally pointless and boring", countered with "you're too much of an idiot to get it, shut up" in artier film boards on there.

I can't wait to read and preserve the boards for Triangle and Primer!