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Claiming they're "no longer providing a positive, useful experience" for the vast majority of its users, IMDB has announced that as of February 20, 2017, their message boards will be no more:
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.
[...] 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.
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Wednesday February 08 2017, @04:17PM
Yeah, whats an IMDb? I guess I can look it up (and to be honest I think I know, but still have to verify), but it seems like what it is could have been provided as a definition in the foot of the submission.
And my looking it up does no service to everyone else, who also need to do the same. Think of the Bothans lost getting us this information!
(Score: 4, Informative) by Hyperturtle on Wednesday February 08 2017, @04:18PM
Internet Movie Database
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Movie_Database [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Hyperturtle on Wednesday February 08 2017, @05:34PM
sorry guys, i don't really read the reviews from poisoned wells unless they are phenomally bad or entertaining. Might have landeded there a few times. I mean -- I am not going to look up the reviews of star wars. I think I get the idea already.
Anyway, my outlook was shaped on previous Internet Behaviors: Once upon a time I entered data into the CDDB database, many many albums, hundreds, typing them in with each CD I ripped into that new MP3 format that came out. CDDB was awesome, play an unknown CD and IT PULLS THE NAMES FROM THE INTERNET! This is too cool! Then they went private and locked us contributors out and started charging for access to the data people like me gave them. For free.
This taught me something. After that I stopped paying attention to these internet databases of media stuff that takes public contributions. Too tempting to repeat mistakes. It also seems they tend to become hostile to their users after a while.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 08 2017, @04:40PM
What is this internet thing again?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 08 2017, @05:21PM
If you are on the internet and are not aware of IMDb then you must live under a rock.
If they mentioned Yahoo in the summary would you be asking why everyone is so excited?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 08 2017, @06:36PM
What's an Yahoo?
(Score: 2) by rts008 on Wednesday February 08 2017, @08:57PM
Wrong question.
Who is Yahoo...Serious, dude. ;-)
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Wednesday February 08 2017, @06:50PM
I only learned about IMDB at university; unsurprisingly in a module about databases. It took a few lectures for me to realise that there really was such a thing, and that it wasn't a ficticious example used by our lecturer.
(Score: 3, Informative) by maxwell demon on Wednesday February 08 2017, @06:50PM
Come on. IMDb is older than the World Wide Web! You honestly never heard of it?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 08 2017, @08:18PM
What's an World Wide Web?
(Score: 4, Informative) by Aiwendil on Wednesday February 08 2017, @08:42PM
Hmm, that one is interesting, a quick lookup tells us:
* 1987 paper list by Col Needham
* pre-1990 USENet posts
* 1989 (March) Berners-Lee writes the proposal "a large hypertext database with typed links"
* 1990 (Sept) failed sales-pitch by Berners-Lee
* 1990 (Oct) shellscript-version of imdb
* 1990 (Dec) Berners-Lee had written his stuff
* 1991 (Jan) first webservers outside of cern
* 1993 imdb on independant server
I guess it all depends on exactly what we consider to be the defining moments (and pre-states are dicey due to NLS).
I'd say "about as old as" :)