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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: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Wednesday February 08 2017, @04:47PM
OH good example here:
Imagine a discussion board for transistors where people used to talk about the exciting world of transistors from 1950 to perhaps 2000. The great conversion from germanium to silicon. The first epitaxials and the death of point contacts. Quantum weirdness with tunnel diodes which commercially flopped. The exciting new world of MOS. The commercial failure of gallium arsenide. The days back then transistor SSRs of modest power first became cheaper than electromechanical power relays. VFDs start to rule the world. Rectifiers go from 50 volt PIV to everything's a 1000 volts PIV. Remember making "diode strings" for high voltage vacuum tube power supplies with equalization resistors and transient capacitors across each diode and you stacked like 10 of them in series for a decade or two and then some mfgr starts shipping 5000 volt PIV rectifiers so you replace like 30 parts on a circuit board with one little diode. Its a little before my time but transistors used to be so low performance they sold them on alpha values and they converted to betas due to high gain around the silicon conversion I donno 1960 or something. RTL DTL TTL made of discrete components. Packaging going from metal cans to plastic and leads going from thru hole to SMD. The first time somebody shipped a darlington in a transistor can. Who remembers jfets? Pour a little of your 40 oz out on the ground in memory of the MPF102. In the pre-internet era who remembers cross reference catalogs for replacement transistor purposes? Who here cut the top off metal can transistors to act as light detectors like in the 70s or 80s because they were bored and didn't want to mail order a single phototransistor across the country with a $25 minimum order (back when minimum wage was like $3). Who remembers SCRs? Triacs? How about stupid Zener effect tricks using non-Zener diodes?
I mean all that stuff was interesting if you were around back then or know the history.
But today imagine how dead a transistor discussion board would be. "Hey guys we sure love ISO9000 practices" "How about that MTBF increasing by another boring decimal point" "If you though 0402 was a small footprint try 0201!" "microcontroller manufacturers stealing 'our' SOT-23 footprint for their own use"
(Score: 2) by nethead on Wednesday February 08 2017, @09:45PM
Yes, I use to live and die by the ECG catalog.
How did my SN UID end up over 3 times my /. UID?