111–120 of 340 posts
There is (was?) a way to add friends on IMDb, but I found it ridiculously hard to find, and even now I can't see their movie ratings or watchlists. The message boards were stuck in the 90s, but at least they got the job done.
Maybe I should write a script to migrate all my ratings to Letterboxd...
Thumbs down to whoever decided to close the boards. I'll miss being able to argue about why a movie is rubbish with someone who thinks it's fantastic, or vice-versa. There's some great discussions on some of the movie boards where people talk about the stories and motivations of characters etc. Sure it gets heated sometimes, but that's life. You just navigate around that stuff and find things worth responding to. Sen…
- I once came across a nomadic TV watching club - they'd decide to watch a classic TV series, and then go to the board for that series to hold weekly discussions (you go in one week and see them discussing the first episode, then go in the next week and see them discussing the second, etc.). When the series was finished, they'd announce the next series they would watch and migrate to that board.
- At one point the board for Kingdom of Heaven was a bunch of history buffs discussion history (and occasionally mentioning the movie).
- Coming across threads that had been going on for over a decade was always interesting. Someone made a comment, a year or two later (long after they've left) someone else comes along and responds to them, a couple years later someone else responds to that, etc.
- The discussion of movie finances could be really informative, and definitely gave me a much deeper understanding of how things work and what it means for a movie to be profitable (basically, it's really complicated).
And of course, the boards were a great place for things like recommendations, up to date news, and learning about things you missed in the film.
This is incredibly sad news. I have been a regular reader of IMDb message boards for over 15 years now. It's the last actual forum that I still visit. There's so much valuable information stored on those boards, it's a tragedy to see it get deleted. Sure the most popular movie threads might be filled with toxic flamewars, but the long tail of more obscure movies has reasonable discussion and human recommendations of…
Exactly. The good finds on the boards are worth the bad contributions - which could be managed with a bit of effort and changing the format. The value of attaching discussion to a movie database is unmatched by any alternative. Take for example the old obscure film Stalker (1979). We see discussions 4 pages long about the meaning of the dog in the film. Or this one, "Other 'visually beautiful' films?", and people res…
I didn't know they had a message board.
Forums were the social add-on of the mid/late-90s that generally produced orders of magnitude higher traffic to a site higher than its core content. Especially if topics were contentious and people insisted on always being “right.” Pair it up with CPV ads in the early days, and folks had a guaranteed income source with little work, and even less if administration of comments were lax.
Thumbs down to whoever decided to close the boards. I'll miss being able to argue about why a movie is rubbish with someone who thinks it's fantastic, or vice-versa. There's some great discussions on some of the movie boards where people talk about the stories and motivations of characters etc. Sure it gets heated sometimes, but that's life. You just navigate around that stuff and find things worth responding to. Sen…
There are some really interesting things you find on the message boards: - I once came across a nomadic TV watching club - they'd decide to watch a classic TV series, and then go to the board for that series to hold weekly discussions (you go in one week and see them discussing the first episode, then go in the next week and see them discussing the second, etc.). When the series was finished, they'd announce the next…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a comment on Reddit saying that the ArchiveTeam is working on archiving them: https://www.reddit.com/r/scifi/comments/5s0iiv/slug/ddbugy5
Does this not run afoul of IP laws?
archive.org, were the data usually ends up, is protected by the law.