Trevor

Yeah, while I'll miss the boards a lot, I'll still use IMDB frequently for genre checks (for Challenges) and for parental advisory/rating info (teenager at home).

Ash Ketchum

I've written hundreds of reviews for IMDB, mostly for films/TV shows that no one had previously commented on, many of them undeservedly obscure. I accept the fact that hardly anyone reads them, but if some of the sentiments expressed here portend a continued exodus of IMDB users I wonder if it's even worth it to continue.

Ranger

I had some good times reading the old IMDB baords about a decade ago before the big changes. Some cool fanfic were posted there but were gone after the update. I hadn't really checked the baords since then.

Groucho

FWIW I frequent IMDB but have always stayed away from the vile message boards, so no changes here.

Mr. Flix

They should re-institute the boards for titles (movies, TV) and let the celebrity-specific boards remain dead. People can just use Google to find out if an actor is gay or has had plastic surgery.

DaveyJoe

I'm going to avoid the site now that the boards are gone. I can find filmographies on wikipedia.

redcon1

Their message boards really came in handy for classic films and TV shows. Very little trolling there as most of the posters had a sincere reason to ask questions or share information. I learned a lot from them on a classic movie I had just watched on TCM or a TV show that I had binged-watched on DVD or streaming service.

I wish they could've kept those up for anything up to say, 1980. Seems like the newer films and shows always had the worse trolling and arguments going on.

zyzzle

I loved the boards for obscure films, most anything pre-1980 would have a very high percentage of good posts to troll / useless posts. I never even bothered for modern films; those aren't my preference anyway, since (IMO!) 95% of them are garbage, and deserve many of those troll posts.

I'm surprised nobody has spoken of the huge elephant in the room; the euphemisms for the boards being axed is the usual bullshit... They wern't harming anyone; the real reason is that they weren't making dear old Amazon any money, so they were just shut down, and POOF! with the wave of a wand, some *invaluable* movie history / facts / genuinely insightful information is GONE...

Like many, many others, the boards for the older, B movies, obscure films genuinely added to my enjoyment and intellectual satiation of a hobby I love: film. I'd go there to gain insight into some cerebral films / some obscure gem, and now that's gone due to a Amazon's greedy, rapacious, and decidedly unfriendly ban hammer...

This was another underhanded, evil move by a huge corporation. All information is ephemeral, and with the press of a few keystrokes, history disappears and is so shaped.... A sad day.

Drexl

I'll miss it too. Where else would I have learned that the kid who played Jack in the 1990 remake of Lord of the Flies grew up to become a criminal and drug addict?

Unclejosh

Right, or the sad story of what happened to Amanda Peterson who was one of my first movie crushes.

Those boards had information and discussions that are not found anywhere else online or at least without some serious searching and surfing.

I actually watched a movie over the weekend and I immediately went to the boards as I usually do out of habit before remembering that it was gone and I was actually saddened because I liked reading other peoples thoughts and info on the movies. I don't have anyone to discuss movies with in my real life and this board as much as I love it doesn't compare to the volume and real discussions (the occasional trolls aside) that the IMDB boards had. I would actually be willing to be a paid subscriber to the site if they kept the boards up.

Brian T

It would be nice if, instead of eliminating the one truly democratic aspect of the site -- the forums -- they'd crack down on the absolutely jaw-dropping amount of fake reviews -- pro and con, but mostly pro, and for shit movies -- that get posted to pages for low-budget films made by nobodies and hacks that are all too willing to hire companies that specialize in planting fake reviews and star-ratings to artificially drive up the rankings with glowing praise or abject hatred, most of it rarely digressing from a set number of words or lines. While I don't rival Ash's numbers, I've posted many long-form and extended capsule reviews over the years, often about lesser-known films, and have striven to be as transparent and explanatory as possible, but when you visit a page these days for some newer no-budget movie you think might be obscure -- deservedly or undeservedly -- only to discover it's mysteriously got dozens, even hundreds of unanimously positive reviews plus a 9.8/10 score despite having been released maybe a month or so beforehand, it doesn't exactly encourage you to write an honest review (at best, it just leads to a bunch of reviews taking the contrary position in extremis to more quickly adjust the ranking back to where it should be. It's not unlike seeing what passes for "reviews" on Amazon these days, where "Great" or "It was well-packaged I love it" is apparently all the literacy and dexterity required for getting something accepted. It certainly makes one miss the "old days" of, like, five years ago, when most people actually tried to help their fellow moviegoers (or shoppers, as the case may be). I wouldn't be surprised if IMDb eventually discourages genuine reviews as well, and just lets marketing shysters flood every movie's listing with fawning praise. Just imagine all the perfect 10 movies there would be!

I also thought the forums were a good source of information that would find it's way into the "Trivia" section for each show. Even if IMDb required more proof than just somebody stating a fact in a forum, the forums often yielded the links to outside sources of verification. Can't see them getting much info like that going forward.

Ash Ketchum

I have a friend who's an indie producer who has asked me to write positive reviews of his films on IMDB and I just won't do it. Even if I had something positive to say, which hasn't been the case yet.

I tend to seek out kung fu movies, Japanese movies, anime, sentai, and, lately, a lot of classic TV western episodes and older documentaries. When I started reviewing in 2001, very few kung fu movies had reviews, so I had the field to myself for a while there.

Troy Stiffler

Ouch.



IMDB is hip to know that their forums are infiltrated by 4Chan types. Those kind of attitudes (anywhere) drag everything down. If we allowed those kind of people to post here, there wouldn't be anyone left here. Shame they couldn't take a stab at strict rules and moderation to curb those people.

Look at Youtube. When every comment sections is infiltrated by hateful comments about Jews and [that word us white guys aren't supposed to say], what good does that do? You can't watch a clip from a Marvel movie without the comments going to crazy-land.

zyzzle

Youtube, Facebook, and all the similar social media sites are 100x worse than the imdb message boards, the lowest of the low in gutter trash and ridiculousness. Yet, they still exist. Why? Because they continue to put $$$$ in their creator's pockets.

IMDB / Amazon couldn't care less about the content of their site, the care only for the almighty dollar, and what types of deals work best to their corporate advantage.

Never mind that the forums were *text*-based, and because of that, probably only consumed 0.001% of the (extremely bloated, graphical) main imdb bandwidrth.

Mondo Kane

Having just finished Nocturnal Animals, it's too bad I can't go there to see what's been written about the opening credits.

Michael Corvin

I never visited the imdb boards, but I have to put Yahoo! comment sections out there as the worst...especially since the election. Every backwater closet asshole has been given a voice and they are loud and proud over on Yahoo!.

hanshotfirst1138

Other than this one guy I liked to follow because he wrote bizarro reviews, the message boards were all I did there. He only reason to back now is to check actors/crew on a movie or see if it was shot on film or what the OAR is. I won't use it nearly as much now.

TheMovieman

Well, IMDb is getting rid of their character pages on December 6. While I generally agree with their statement in some respects, although I think this is one more thing to cut down on costs, these were sometimes valuable. Not all that upset but I assume there are others who have used it in the past.

https://getsatisfaction.com/imdb/top...mdb-characters

Brian T

Can't say I was even aware of some of those features, unlike the forums, but it does seem like yet another way to cut users out of the equation now that they've become a corporate shilling machine.

But hey, now we've got The IMDb Show to compensate!

(I watched about 30 seconds, click-skipped through the rest, and will never watch it again. Superficial YouTube-grade hipster shit).

mickey65

I agree with your post - word to word. I would do the same exact thing! And I really miss those boards now too!

TheMovieman

Well, seems like they've also removed user reviews from the main page of individual movies. You can still access them from the side bar.

Mabuse

Are they going to remove the star ratings soon?

TheMovieman

Only a matter of time it seems

I actually prefer using Letterboxd nowadays.

Ash Ketchum

I panicked because I thought they'd removed my reviews when I went to check a title today. But you have to click on "User Reviews" now to access them. Adding an extra step like that discourages even more people from reading the reviews. I've got 729 reviews up now (I started doing them in 2001) and I wonder if it's even worth posting them anymore.

Brian T

Does this switch depend on one's device or browser perhaps? In Firefox on my desktop, I can still see one user review on the main page as always (with the usual "See all XX user reviews" link beneath it). The App on both my phone and iPad seems to be the same, with part of one randomly generated user review on the main page which you can then tap to see a full list of user reviews (headline and first few lines visible). Tapping each of those now drops down the full review, rather than opening it in a new window as it has previously. Perhaps my toys just aren't up to date yet.

Still, I'm not surprised if they're really doing this. The whole site has been stealthily co-opted by Hollywood marketers (enabled by Col Needham's desperate need to arse-creep and whitewash celebrities). In terms of soft-balling, it's becoming the equivalent of the phony "Movieland" style magazines of the 1940's, not unlike pretty much every "entertainment" show on TV and the web right now. Thankfully, one can learn about the darker realities of the industry through the site's "news" section, thanks to it aggregating stories from other sites that don't feel so compelled to polish Hollywood's knob. But I'm sure eventually even that section will consist of "selected" news items only.

Incidentally, if like me you keep track of your film ratings through the site or its app (nothing against Letterboxd; it just didn't exist by the time I'd already rated thousands of movies at IMDb), it's worth exporting the list every once in a while just in case they do decide to disable that feature some day. I don't really see that happening as the star ratings undoubtedly have their value to studio the marketing sluggos, but one never knows.


Presumably you've got them backed up elsewhere for safe keeping or future re-posting elsewhere?