RIP to the IMDB message boards

[Trevor]

I used to like them and made some friends on there but of late, they've become hateful and very spiteful: I remember saying that the movie Invictus was full of inaccuracies about the SA situation in 1995 and I got flamed, people said that I was a supporter of the apartheid authorities for criticizing a movie like that. 

Nahh, I won't miss the boards after they close permanently.

[LilCerberus]

Double Bummer

[Pacman000]

From the looks of the announcement, they're going to delete all the content too.  That bugs me.  Even if I was never able to get an account (they wanted my phone or credit card number) I still liked the forum.  There was a link to it at the bottom of every movie's page; the comments, tho sometimes harsh, provided extra info on the movie.  I'll miss that. Doubly sad: the Internet Archive can't crawl IMDb's forum; the robot.txt file blocks them. Even the forum closing announcement is blocked. 

(I already posted most of this on another website.)

[Pacman000]

I used to like them and made some friends on there but of late, they've become hateful and very spiteful: I remember saying that the movie Invictus was full of inaccuracies about the SA situation in 1995 and I got flamed, people said that I was a supporter of the apartheid authorities for criticizing a movie like that. 

Nahh, I won't miss the boards after they close permanently.

Amazing with all the hoops folk would have to go through to join, IMDb still wound up with a toxic culture. 

Here's the closing announcement: http://www.imdb.com/board/announcement

Oddly, IMDb still has a large archive of Usenet postings: http://www.imdb.com/reviews/index.html

[Trevor]

I think some of this is due to the huge blow-back the IMDB and people like Paul Feig got over the Ghostbusters reboot, as well as the public's damming of films which led to bad word of mouth about films.  It's OK to give your opinion on films but - unlike here - the words on those message boards turned to hateful rhetoric very quickly which is sad.

Incidentally, when I first used this thing called the Internetz in 1997  the first site I went to was the IMDB and the first film I saw advertised on the net was Event Horizon, which said it was a cheerful, cuddly, family comedy. 

Never trusted the Internet after that. 

[Trevor]

I checked the IMDB yesterday: the message boards are gone.

[BoyScoutKevin]

They are not the only one gone. The blog search engine icerocket.com will cease to exist ere the month is over, and within the past year, 9 more message boards, where I use to post have ceased to exist.

Would the last person posting on the internet turn off the lights and close the door on the way out?

[RCMerchant]

I don't give a f**k-I never had a credit card anyway-f**k em!

[Pacman000]

They are not the only one gone. The blog search engine icerocket.com will cease to exist ere the month is over, and within the past year, 9 more message boards, where I use to post have ceased to exist.

Would the last person posting on the internet turn off the lights and close the door on the way out?

DMOZ closed a few weeks ago.  The editors are working on bringing it back under a new name, but I'm still sad.

ScrubTheWeb, a small but-fairly-decent search engine closed recently.  It had been running since the late 90's. They plan to sell off their domain name, but not their technology.  No clue what they plan to do with it.

[Pacman000]

I used to like them and made some friends on there but of late, they've become hateful and very spiteful: I remember saying that the movie Invictus was full of inaccuracies about the SA situation in 1995 and I got flamed, people said that I was a supporter of the apartheid authorities for criticizing a movie like that. 

Nahh, I won't miss the boards after they close permanently.

Amazing with all the hoops folk would have to go through to join, IMDb still wound up with a toxic culture. 

Here's the closing announcement: http://www.imdb.com/board/announcement

Oddly, IMDb still has a large archive of Usenet postings: http://www.imdb.com/reviews/index.html

Now IMDB's deleted their Usenet Archive too.  :(

[Fox Sake]

Things started to go down the pan with IMDb when Amazon swooped down and squeezed the last drop of objective integrity out of it.

Not only have the message boards gone, but there are a few other little things going on behind the scenes that have the IMDB experience even more empty, not least for the way you can no longer sort user reviews. Instead it is defaulted to "Helpfullness", which suggests you have to trawl through pages and pages of happy-clappy reviews before you get to the realty-check zone.

i'l give it another 5 years before IMDb is either sold on again, or shut down because it is showing its age but no longer its true independence