Employee
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8.4K Messages
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193.3K Points
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.
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.
stacey_5lgyj1dqi4jrt
2 Messages
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170 Points
9 years ago
Please do not close down the Message Boards!
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beersandshots
4 Messages
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442 Points
9 years ago
Take any three adjacent messages in any thread on any board for any title, and the chances are really good that the messages are related to each other. Now try that on the other platforms you are offering as a "better alternative". Good luck with that.
"Hey guys- I've got an idea- lets take all the threads from all the titles on IMDb and put them in one list arranged chronologically according to the timestamp of the original post." How is it that the person that originally suggested that idea is still with IMDb? That person, along with the oxygen thieves that agreed with that idea need to be bred out of existence.
Bad call, IMDb, really bad call.
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rj_aznir
5 Messages
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490 Points
9 years ago
Would anyone else pay to use IMDB Message Boards?
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riverdeep
45 Messages
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2.2K Points
9 years ago
Then Yahoo bought them out. Yahoo, in their wisdom, couldn't make a go of it - so they shut it down and everyone lost their websites :-(
BUT... at least Yahoo gave everyone some decent time to prepare for it - at least a YEAR I seem to recall, not 2 WEEKS...
But I digress - the point I'm making is that the world didn't end after Geocities was nuked by Yahoo - (arguably it was a worse place, for sure, as it was a decision motivated by nothing but corporate greed, ie. to save a few pennies at the expense of many, many users) - but look what happened to Yahoo since then...
Corporate Karma, I call it :-p
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lisa_degroff
6 Messages
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270 Points
9 years ago
Would it not be possible to keep boards for movies of a certain age (I don't know, ten years, or twenty) open - just not for new movies, in order to keep the trolling in check? It really seems that IMdB is throwing the baby out with the bath water.
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dtinhi
15 Messages
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1.1K Points
9 years ago
Last night I watched a movie on TCM. As is habit for the past 13 years that I've been an IMDb member, I thought hmmm, I wonder what others thought about a certain scene. Went to the film's board and read many opinions about it. I'm not going to get that ANYWHERE after you shut down the boards. And all those well-thought-out posts will be gone. Thousands upon thousands of them.
This is like watching a family member on their deathbed, knowing that everything they ever knew will be gone with the flip of a switch.
Not sure why you don't just get rid of the general boards and keep the individual movie/tv show/actor/director boards.
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kz_fu1vlrl2hrvwm
2 Messages
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220 Points
9 years ago
Dear IMDB, Please read the petition and boards themselves to see how many around the world care that the message boards remain. Perhaps you can incorporate what led to the decision into a new set of rules under which they may be kept open. Their loss would be great. They are perhaps the only place to go for elevated, or just generic, discourse about films and TV, past and present, with those from around the globe.
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nosy_parker
3 Messages
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200 Points
9 years ago
It's dismaying to see you will shut down the boards, though I agree that many people become abusive and that should be moderated. However, there's a wealth of information that users have provided over the years, useful stuff about various movies and personalities. Even if you won't allow any more posts, couldn't you just leave the ones that are there in place? I've frequently found good information posted by users that wasn't available in the normal way, and it would be a shame to lose that vast store of knowledge.
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lisa_doyle_4ll0sk5efo125
1 Message
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180 Points
9 years ago
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sunflower17
1 Message
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200 Points
9 years ago
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cloister_56
1 Message
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180 Points
9 years ago
With modern search engines I can find out who is in a movie, get reviews and pages of goofs. What IMDB has is after I've seen any movie or tv show I can go on it's message board and chat to people about it. There is nowhere else that offers this on one site.
For the bigger shows this will survive they have their own websites but for smaller or older shows there will be nothing. Want to discuss an ending in a show like Daybreak or Timeslip or thousands of other shows then good luck finding an active message board for them.
As for having an account with IMDB, what would be the point. I don't need to log in to look at information and as there will be no discussion happening my account would be useless.
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tanya_nicole_holmes
1 Message
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132 Points
9 years ago
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mia_donativo
5 Messages
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352 Points
9 years ago
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vincent_rains
1 Message
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180 Points
9 years ago
Providing Facebook and other social media as a conversation platform for individual movies (or anybody involved in movie creation) isn't a great alternative. I "liked" IMDB on Facebook years ago, but I rarely use Facebook and I honestly couldn't tell you the last time I viewed the IMDB page.
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riverdeep
45 Messages
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2.2K Points
9 years ago
My main gripe with the current message boards (well - pretty much my only gripe!) is that there is no built-in Search functionality. This results in multiple posts about the same things, because there's no way for users to know whether a topic has been covered before or not - without actually reading/scanning through EVERY topic on a board.
WHICH COULD BE EASILY FIXED, simply by removing the existing bar on Google indexing - currently you cannot search the boards with Google because of a robots.txt (or similar barring method) that seems to exist for no good reason at all that I can think of. Remove that, and users would be able to make a quick search to see if their query has been asked before, and then go directly to the appropriate thread!
There would be absolutely zero investment required, and minimal changes (or even no changes at all) to the existing html.
As for trolls, I have used the Message Boards regularly since their inception in 2002 and have found very little problem with this at all, even recently. And when I find one I don't like - it's an easy fix - just block them and voila!
So Mr Needham I implore you, please do not relegate the millions of words of wisdom that have been written by users far more knowledgable than myself over the last 15 odd years to the scrapheap of history. That would be more than a shame - it would be a damned tragedy.
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