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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday February 08 2017, @03:53PM   Printer-friendly
from the that's-a-wrap dept.

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.

Variety, BBC, TheWrap.


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  • (Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 08 2017, @07:59PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 08 2017, @07:59PM (#464721)

    IMDB was told by a certain group to end their comment system so people cannot communicate using their website. Too many comment systems gives them technical challenges to track each commenter and cross-reference with other comments that user made in other places.

    Truth is the enemy of that group and they will fight tooth and nail to stop it from getting to too many ears.

    If IMDB was not lying here, why wouldn't they fix their comment system? "Toxic comments" is only an excuse. The real reason is control over the truth. Just think about it...

    The group that lurks in the shadows and does not like the light of truth questioning their dark, evil, unfounded claims is controlling information flow. They want one channel for all communication, where it can be controlled and "fixed".

    We need to replicate IMDB. User-funded. Not located anywhere in the "free world". If TPB can stay alive and well, why can't a user-run IMDB?

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 09 2017, @01:53AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 09 2017, @01:53AM (#464845)

    Oh you are not wrong. But the comment section in IMDB was basically 'dead' anyway. Pick a movie any movie say from 10 years back. Scroll to the bottom. You will see the comment section is probably dead there. Whoever happened to post last 'wins'. Probably the crappiest thing they added was the 'lists' thing. Basically people posting a bunch of top 10/100 of whatever genre they thought of. Sometimes interesting but usually not. This move will probably nuke the contributions to it and it will stagnate too.

    They were interesting to read but not terribly useful.

    I just hope they turn the whole thing over to archive.org.

    But if you are serious about starting an alternate version? ftp://ftp.fu-berlin.de/pub/misc/movies/database/ [fu-berlin.de] One of the things they have done since the beginning. Thought about doing 'something' with it for years but never could really figure out 'what'.

    Once amazon bought it the 'monitization' was sure to follow.