Col_Needham's profile
Employee

Employee

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8.2K Messages

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190.5K Points

Friday, February 3rd, 2017

Closed

IMDb message boards

Please see the text below from http://www.imdb.com/board/announcement

In addition, we have created a new Get Satisfaction categories for "I Need to Know" to replace the "I Need to Know" message board and "IMDb Poll" to replace the "IMDb Poll" message board. A post on the Contributors Help board explains the migration path from there to the newly renamed Get Satisfaction category "Data Issues & Policy Discussions"  (which is an already active community here). 

An FAQ on the closure is now available at http://www.imdb.com/help/show_leaf?boardsclosurefaq

IMDb Message Boards Announcement

IMDb is the world’s most popular and authoritative source for movie, TV and celebrity content. 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 on February 20, 2017. This includes the Private Message system. After in-depth discussion and examination, we have concluded that IMDb’s message boards are no longer providing a positive, useful experience for the vast majority of our more than 250 million monthly users worldwide. The decision to retire a long-standing feature was made only after careful consideration and was based on data and traffic.

Increasingly, IMDb customers have migrated to IMDb’s social media accounts as the primary place they choose to post comments and communicate with IMDb’s editors and one another. IMDb’s Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/imdb) and official Twitter account (https://twitter.com/imdb) have an audience of more than 10 million engaged fans. IMDb also maintains official accounts on Snapchat (https://www.snapchat.com/add/imdblive), Pinterest (https://www.pinterest.com/imdbofficial/), YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/imdb), and Tumblr (http://imdb.tumblr.com/).

Because IMDb’s message boards continue to be utilized by a small but passionate community of IMDb users, we announced our decision to disable our message boards on February 3, 2017 but will leave them open for two additional weeks so that users will have ample time to archive any message board content they’d like to keep for personal use. During this two-week transition period, which concludes on February 19, 2017, IMDb message board users can exchange contact information with any other board users they would like to remain in communication with (since once we shut down the IMDb message boards, users will no longer be able to send personal messages to one another). We regret any disappointment or frustration IMDb message board users may experience as a result of this decision.

IMDb is passionately committed to providing innovative ways for our hundreds of millions of users to engage and communicate with one another. We will continue to enhance our current offerings and launch new features in 2017 and beyond that will help our customers communicate and express themselves in meaningful ways while leveraging emerging technologies and opportunities.


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5 Messages

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456 Points

9 years ago

Sigh. IMDb will surely lose its popularity as a result of removing the boards. If anything, they should've been read-only instead of shutting them down entirely. Oh well, apparently the users/readers of IMDb message boards don't matter.

2 Messages

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250 Points

9 years ago

This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled Please allow me to retrieve my message board history!.

I have been an avid user of the message boards for 12 years if not more. I am crushed by your decision to remove your message boards from your site, which were 90% of my reason for visiting in the first place. The WORST part is that there is no way for me to retrieve my posts! I am aware that you announced this, but I didn't notice this development until tonight and therefore had no chance to archive my old posts. I am not typically this emotional a person, and this may sound trivial, but movies are a huge part of my life and this message board served as a journal for my thoughts and feelings on almost all of the films and television I've watched over the last 12 years. Deleting my history and not allowing me to even access old posts is quite frankly an outrage! You might as well have gone into my room and ripped up my journal. That is how strongly I feel about this decision. All I'm asking is that you allow me to access my old posts, or at least provide an archive for users of the message boards. Please! 

6 Messages

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460 Points

9 years ago

Monday 20th of februari 2017 is a very Black Monday indeed. You've just killed your darling, Mr Needham. I call it "A Crime."

1 Message

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142 Points

9 years ago

I hope everyone enjoys their new Amazon®TM Commericals: Advertisement Home Edition home page, formerly known as IMDB.
Last time I'll ever click the site.

12 Messages

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326 Points

9 years ago

This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled Where is my friends???.

You shut down message board and now we cant reach friends list, What is going on?
Everyday i check my friends account and look what they watched.
I couldnt save the users list  because there is no option like save the list thats why i add them friends and i could look at to their list.
But now no friends no list no message boards of course ....

Are you happy now IMDB?

3 Messages

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544 Points

9 years ago

IMDb is the next Blockbuster. I think it's impressive how you decided to throw away a huge chunk of traffic for... what reason? Not enough ad revenue? How does LESS traffic help that?

If any board users want to stick it to IMDb, please browse IMDb with Adblock Plus. https://adblockplus.org/ Worst case scenario is their massive loss of ad revenue doesn't bring back the discussions and they just die faster.

39 Messages

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930 Points

9 years ago

This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled Discussion boards.

Where are the discussion boards under the films and the persons? Yesterday (Febr. 19, 2017) they were there. Today not anymore. Why?

2 Messages

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130 Points

Why?

24 Messages

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2.6K Points

$$$, corporate greed.  American Capitalism which is completely at odds with the "art" the site is supposed to be about.   Pathetic.  I posted a re-posted post by a former employee and...Col finally deleted it for "libel" and "legal" under the email I got.  I posted it like last week and I think he either finally got around to reading these posts on the 20th after deleting all the boards, or finally got annoyed enough to actually do something based off them.  Why don't you give us new boards Col and make yourself useful ?  This is a pathetically stupid decision that will ruin your site and diminish your precious "profits".  You have lost your way, but its not too late to get it back...

24 Messages

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2.6K Points

Sign this petition, already over 10,000+  signatures ...

https://www.ipetitions.com/petition/petition-to-keep-the-imdb-messageboards-going

24 Messages

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2.6K Points

6 Messages

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338 Points

9 years ago

Thanks for giving us the heads up!!!  Would it have killed you to send out an email just notifying us that we were about to lose ALL of our posts??!!  I'm so annoyed about this.  Some of my posts had a lot of thought and care invested in them.  I would have liked to have saved some them.

The message boards on here were a huge resource for me to discuss and get information on movies.  I can't believe you've discontinued them.  You've just turned your site into a tenth of what it once was.  Hope you're OK with your traffic going down exponentially.

What the hell were you thinking.  X(

2 Messages

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130 Points

I don't get this, either. I really enjoyed the section of IMDB

3 Messages

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300 Points

I'm ditching my reviews on IMDB and will look for other sites. The message board was an important resource made up of contributions from long-time members. A lot of really good discussions just got blown away. A lot of the less popular but important films and independent movies, people and foreign films had very thoughtful and useful threads dating back many years. All sent to the trash with one click? SHAME.

2 Messages

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142 Points

At least a couple of sites have archived at least some of he message board content:

 has archived a lot of the individual boards, and content through a week or so ago.

Archiveteam seems to have downloaded the boards as one massive database that you can download and search.

There may be others.

5 Messages

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456 Points

^ Moviechat has downloaded most of the boards as well.

2 Messages

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142 Points

Thanks, http://www.moviechat.org/ should have been in my second sentence, but I didn't add the URL correctly.

4 Messages

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398 Points

themoviedb.org is my frontrunner.  They have a DB entry for each film, with a board for each film, person, etc.  I have gotten quick responses to two threads I've started on non-current titles, so that gives me hope.

6 Messages

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338 Points

"Archiveteam seems to have downloaded the boards as one massive database that you can download and search."

Wow!  Has anyone tried this?  How massive is that download?

Just checked out moviechat.org and was amazed to see threads that have been copied over from IMDb.  However, I was dismayed to find that they seem to have been copied over in a very incomplete, haphazard way.  For instance, one of my threads has probably two-thirds of the responses missing, and the ones that are there are out of order and have lost their formatting, making it pretty much impossible to follow the course of the conversation.  Still, this is better than nothing!  Thank you for sharing!

6 Messages

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338 Points

"Archiveteam seems to have downloaded the boards as one massive database that you can download and search."

Wow!  Has anyone tried this?  How massive is that download?

Just checked out moviechat.org and was amazed to see threads that have been copied over from IMDb.  However, I was dismayed to find that they seem to have been copied over in a very incomplete, haphazard way.  For instance, one of my threads has probably two-thirds of the responses missing, and the ones that are there are out of order and have lost their formatting, making it pretty much impossible to follow the course of the conversation.  Still, this is better than nothing!  Thank you for sharing!

3 Messages

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300 Points

9 years ago

I'm ditching my reviews on IMDB and will look for other sites. The message board was an important resource made up of contributions from long-time members. A lot of really good discussions just got blown away. A lot of the less popular but important films and independent movies, people and foreign films had very thoughtful and useful threads dating back many years. All sent to the trash with one click? SHAME.

8 Messages

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374 Points

come join us at http://theimdbforum.com . I've created a message board there. Also creating "glamour" profiles for actors, producers etc so that hopefully they also join so that they can interact with us like they did at the other message board.

8 Messages

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374 Points

9 years ago

Hi guys. I'm disappointed like the rest of you. I was on IMDB for almost 10 years.  I've created an IMDB boards/forums alternative at http://theimdbforum.com

3 Messages

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412 Points

9 years ago

This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled My first "oops, forgot it's useless" moment.

I got an email suggestion from a friend about a group of us going to see the new movie "The Shack" when it comes out.  Since I hadn't heard of it, I did what I always do: headed over to IMDB to find out more.  I looked it up and started scrolling down the page to find the message board link and see what people have to say about it.  About halfway to the bottom of the page I remembered, "Oh yeah, the boards are gone now" and closed the page.

I expect to have at least a couple more of those "forgot IMDB is a waste of time now" incidents before I start remembering to avoid going to IMDB at all.  This site simply has no more value for me.  Wikipedia has better episode lists for TV shows, and I can find cast lists or photos anywhere.  With the message boards gone there's simply no reason to come back to IMDB.

2 Messages

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120 Points

9 years ago

This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled Trump IMDb account.

Wouldn't it have been easier to just delete Trump's IMDb account instead shutting down all the message boards ???

3.5K Messages

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85.7K Points

I don't think Trump has an IMDb account. He does have a Twitter account that he uses much too often.

10.7K Messages

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226.1K Points

For something so catastrophic, there are/were an awful lot of people with a large sense of humor about it.

758 Messages

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29.6K Points

9 years ago

3 Messages

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232 Points

9 years ago

I'm very disappointed in IMDb's decision to end the boards. I found the reasoning bad and lazy. The boards did need an update and better troll monitoring, but overall it was still a positive place I could always discuss a particular movie or show. I hope the administrators of this site find a way to have a modern forum set up for each movie like before even if means having a third-party service monitor it. The message boards were 90-percent of the reason I come to this site.  

1 Message

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120 Points

9 years ago

Very disappointing news.