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IMDb closing their forums

Posted: February 16th, 2017, 2:08 pm
by pacman000
http://www.imdb.com/board/announcement

From the looks of the announcement, they're going to delete all the content too. That bugs me. Even if I was never able to get an account (they wanted my phone or credit card number) I still liked the forum. There was a link to it at the bottom of every movie's page; the comments, tho sometimes harsh, provided extra info on the movie. I'll miss that. Doubly sad: the Internet Archive can't crawl IMDb's forum; the robot.txt file blocks them. Even the forum closing announcement is blocked. :evil:

(I already posted most of this on another website.)

Traditional message boards have had it rough lately...

Re: IMDb closing their forums

Posted: February 16th, 2017, 2:57 pm
by scotland
Wow. Thanks for posting this. This is unfortunate. I would often go to IMDB after watching an old movie to check out the boards there. There could be a host of information.

Hopefully the user reviews will remain, but maybe not. I remember when Netflix decided it was in 'our' best interest to remove user contributed content like lists as well. In reality, its discomfort with user contributed content on their site damaging their brand. Its a real concern, but things like moderators could help that, and it drives traffic to their main site and not tangential sites like some tumblr or snapchat account.

Re: IMDb closing their forums

Posted: February 16th, 2017, 7:22 pm
by Luigi & Peach
I always found it neat to go there after watching a movie with a vague ending and read people's interpretations of the ending ( and there almost always was a thread on that subject). I can't believe they're going to scrub everything that's previously been posted too. Very disappointing.

Re: IMDb closing their forums

Posted: February 17th, 2017, 8:23 am
by pacman000
scotland wrote:Wow. Thanks for posting this. This is unfortunate. I would often go to IMDB after watching an old movie to check out the boards there. There could be a host of information.

Hopefully the user reviews will remain, but maybe not. I remember when Netflix decided it was in 'our' best interest to remove user contributed content like lists as well. In reality, its discomfort with user contributed content on their site damaging their brand. Its a real concern, but things like moderators could help that, and it drives traffic to their main site and not tangential sites like some tumblr or snapchat account.

Funny thing: All of IMDb's content is user contributed, like Wikipedia but much older. They started on Usenet as a list of actresses with pretty eyes. There's still a bunch of old Usenet posts hidden on IMDb's servers: http://www.imdb.com/reviews/index.html

Re: IMDb closing their forums

Posted: February 17th, 2017, 1:31 pm
by Stalvern
This is awful. One of my favorite things about IMDB is going to the page of some B-movie and seeing one of the cast or crew post candidly about their experiences decades ago (or what they're up to now). I really hope that the Wayback has the best stuff saved; there's no way that I can remember all of what I'd want to "archive for personal use" before it's gone.

Re: IMDb closing their forums

Posted: October 29th, 2017, 10:27 pm
by scotland
Has anyone found a good replacement for the IMDb forums yet?

I watched one of those twist ending movies, and thought what a fun movie to discuss - but where? Reddit maybe?

Re: IMDb closing their forums

Posted: October 29th, 2017, 11:14 pm
by pacman000
Badmovies.org has a fairly nice forum.

Re: IMDb closing their forums

Posted: November 1st, 2017, 3:08 pm
by Mario500
scotland wrote:Has anyone found a good replacement for the IMDb forums yet?

I watched one of those twist ending movies, and thought what a fun movie to discuss - but where? Reddit maybe?


Could you post the name of the movie?

Re: IMDb closing their forums

Posted: November 19th, 2017, 6:00 pm
by pacman000
TMdB seems to be promising: https://www.themoviedb.org

If you want to talk about a certain movie search for it then click on discussions.

MovieChat.org also looks promising: https://moviechat.org

They may have saved some of IMdB's forum content.

Re: IMDb closing their forums

Posted: November 19th, 2017, 6:31 pm
by scotland
pacman000 wrote: MovieChat.org also looks promising: https://moviechat.org

They may have saved some of IMdB's forum content.


Thanks! Movie chat does look like the old IMdB forums, with the forums going back several years at least.