IMDB is shutting down their Message Boards

Sadik B

Sadik B

Well-known member
IMDb is the world's most popular and authoritative source for movie, TV and celebrity content. 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.
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http://www.imdb.com/board/announcement
 
Can you blame them? Most message boards that aren't tightly moderated turn into cesspools. Wretched hives of scum & villainy!
 
Pity,it was a strange and varied forum but was very useful and interesting for the more niche productions that the idiots did not watch.

It did need better moderation though
 
It's a sad thing when a company (their parent company is Amazon) has the ability to pay to make the tool necessary to automate 90% of the crap removal from the user generated content and formally pay a few people to moderate as community managers. Add in a little seeding of content and problem solved.

The site is currently ranked 42-46 depending on whose numbers you go by and they have a viable product to draw an audience already and they already purchased it for 55 million ...the logic kills me.
 
I am/was a frequent user of these boards as I watch a lot of movies and I am so sad that they are gonna close it.

You should know that their statement is giving a false representation of why they closed it. Sure, there were trolls and such but that was never a big problem as they state it.

They clearly couldn't make much money of these boards, so they shut it down, not because of the trolls. Forums are dying...
 
ManagerJosh said:
Anyone interested in starting an IMDB replacement?
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If you look in imdb, there are lots of posts linking to alternatives. I think it is a great opportunity fro someone to start an alternative, but I think it would be rather ambitious to try to do the whole thing as opposed to smaller niches each dealing with a genre.

The other thing is any alternative should be up and running the second imdb announced the closure, in order to get on the bandwagon that all the other imdb replacements sites are on and spamming the board left right and centre wit their links.

Too late now I fear.
 
Mr Lucky said:
If you look in imdb, there are lots of posts linking to alternatives. I think it is a great opportunity fro someone to start an alternative, but I think it would be rather ambitious to try to do the whole thing as opposed to smaller niches each dealing with a genre.

The other thing is any alternative should be up and running the second imdb announced the closure, in order to get on the bandwagon that all the other imdb replacements sites are on and spamming the board left right and centre wit their links.

Too late now I fear.
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None of the alternatives scale really well. One board is using freeforums, and that's going to be overwhelmed quickly.
 
ManagerJosh said:
None of the alternatives scale really well. One board is using freeforums, and that's going to be overwhelmed quickly.
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I haven't actually seen them.

But as I said, if you are going to do it, do it right now in time to post on every single imdb discussion to grab the people. Or , just get very very good SEO and hope for the best.

There is an audience out there and could be good only if you have the resources to deal with more trolls than you can imagine.
 
Opening a movie forum is not an alternative at all. What is your content going to be?
People already discuss movies on Social Media, that is why IMDB is closing down their forums.

So a platform to discuss things is by far not sufficient. You need something, like a movie database, so people come back and use it. But the current XF1 has no addons to build a database, so you are basically left with bunch of forum categories and nodes. And nobody will visit those kind of forums.
 
Mr Lucky said:
I haven't actually seen them.

But as I said, if you are going to do it, do it right now in time to post on every single imdb discussion to grab the people. Or , just get very very good SEO and hope for the best.

There is an audience out there and could be good only if you have the resources to deal with more trolls than you can imagine.
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This is the list on the IMDB forums.

http://www.imdb.com/board/bd0000001/thread/266024947
 
hmmm imdb.com/board is now forwarding to a 404 page.. I Wonder if they pulled the plug early due to all the spam of other sites
 
ManagerJosh said:
Great find. Challenge though is there's too many blank forums now. Makes the forums look dead.
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Yeap, but looking, user #1 shows as .. Joined: Feb 5, 2017, so less then 2 weeks old. So maybe it will grow. My concern if it was my site, if it grew large is infringing trademark by having IMD within my domain name. Looks like it is run by @Alex Vojacek
 

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