TR Forums

Imdb is closing its forums for some unclear reason:
http://www.imdb.com/board/announcement

It's a useful site, and a veteran one at that, but a lot of their design and management decisions are puzzling.

Like the redesign a few years ago that, among other things, ruined the list that shows your own movie votes. Instead of showing the real release year it started showing the US-local one. It's also no longer possible to sort by year (but possible by other fields).

Or people's pages, where the credit types (Director, Writer, Misc Crew...) are sorted by quantity rather than by what people are known for. Take Steven Spielberg. First there's Producer credits, then Writer, and only 3rd you get Director. Huh? Thankfully, I think the "self" and "thanks" categories always get relegated to the end, else Spielberg would get Thanks listed before Director.

I've never used the forums there, so I have no idea what the S/N ratio is like. Maybe they just got tired of policing the forums, and figured saying "everyone seems to be moving to Facebook and Twitter anyway" was a good way to wash their hands of the whole thing.

I do think the move is unfortunate. Consolidation of internet discussion onto a small number of large, centralized platforms feels like a bad move to me.

I rarely post there, but I do read every now and then.

The forums that are directly linked to each movie and person are ideal for some things. When you're wondering about an odd scene in a movie, or what happened to a director that hasn't done anything in years, or what's going on with an interesting project that never manages to go into full production. Also, just to see what people think of this or that, or to find movies to watch thru random mentions. You could do all that in other forums, but it won't be as organized and easy to access and I'd probably not bother in most cases.

By the way, another unclear Imdb practice was/is to just delete old threads.

Despite all the problems Imdb is still a good site, but maybe it's time for something new to take its place. Something more democratic, more wiki/community driven, and that is operated by movie buffs rather than a corporation.

Allmusic took a turn for the worse when it went corporate as well. It's still useful, but not what it used to be; a lot of newer stuff just doesn't get reviewed. I've also sent them corrections that never got incorporated into the articles. These days they run a lot of banner ads that expand into the area where the search box is when the page finishes loading, so if you're impatient and try to click the search box too soon you end up clicking through on a banner ad instead. It feels like they've intentionally designed the landing page to encourage this "mistake".

meerkt wrote:

Something more democratic, more wiki/community driven, and that is operated by movie buffs rather than a corporation.

It's like a cycle. Community gets big, sells/goes Corporate. Corporate does things community doesn't like. New community is formed. Community gets big, sells.... etc...

Sucks

JBI wrote:

It feels like they've intentionally designed the landing page to encourage this "mistake".

This sort of thing drives me *CRAZY* when it happens. I don't have enough to give.

And, yeah, I suspect it just can't be coincidental in all cases.

Like, if there is one thing I could fix with the modern web it's this sort of behavior. I'd almost prefer popups at this point.

Glorious wrote:

I'd almost prefer popups at this point.

Popups are most preferable to me at this point. I have my left hand trained on Ctrl+W whenever I see them. Too bad some are popunders and I have to alt-tab first to find them.

That's unfortunate; the discussion boards were one of the last bastions of unique content on IMDB. Amazon's been slowly turning it into just another media storefront though, so I suppose I'm not totally surprised by this. These days I mostly just go to Wikipedia to learn about shows/movies and their cast.

I also don't understand their closure announcement message, which I find very disconnected.

Increasingly, IMDb customers have migrated to IMDb's social media accounts as the primary place they choose to post comments and communicate with IMDb's editors and one another

Like Facebook and Twitter are any sort of alternative to focused discussion forums.

Or this fake graciousness:

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 ...

Two weeks, ample time. Good thing Amazon isn't a webmail provider.

And unhappy people in this thread:
http://www.imdb.com/board/bd0000040/nest/264681264?p=23
Edit: Now turned into a read-only thread. Imdb doesn't want to hear any more of that...

just brew it! wrote:

Allmusic took a turn for the worse when it went corporate as well. ... These days they run a lot of banner ads that expand into the area where the search box is

Allmusic's layout indeed became more annoying, but I think it also wasn't great in the past.
If you use the site enough to spend time on it, maybe fix the layout with local user-CSS overrides.

Glorious wrote:

JBI wrote:

It feels like they've intentionally designed the landing page to encourage this "mistake".

This sort of thing drives me *CRAZY* when it happens. I don't have enough  :evil: to give.

And, yeah, I suspect it just can't be coincidental in all cases. 

From some of the things I've read it rarely is just coincidence. 

And... they've removed the forums. Not even leaving them read-only. Fills kinda empty now, something amiss.

An article from the guy who coded the Imdb forums back in 2001:
https://www.beatworm.co.uk/blog/interne ... ds-no-more

Maybe they are just getting ready to sell or at least be absorbed by something else.

I don't think Amazon needs the money.

meerkt wrote:

I don't think Amazon needs the money.

Hence the reason I said, "absorbed by something else."

Sometimes when it comes to upgrades or enhancements there may be somethings that may interfere with that process. Forums are tricky, even here at TR there was some issues when they upgraded awhile back.

Glorious wrote:

It's like a cycle. Community gets big, sells/goes Corporate. Corporate does things community doesn't like. New community is formed. Community gets big, sells.... etc...

Sucks

You're perfectly correct, Glorious, but in this case it does indeed suck because all those forum threads had a ton of useful movie info; One way or another they're all going to be inaccessible soon.

It's a sad truth. But I know there were things that were started in the forums that have carried over to the main pages. E.g. Movie quotes, they originally started in the forums way back in the early 90's. And now they have their own page attached to the movie/show.

Vhalidictes wrote:

all those forum threads had a ton of useful movie info; One way or another they're all going to be inaccessible soon.

Not sure where it's supposed to be accessible, but The Archive Team grabbed it all:
http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title= ... e_Database

Well, I suppose not older threads that Imdb pruned regularly in past years.

Another group also managed to grab all of the forums somehow.

http://www.moviechat.org/

It just sucks because it doesn't link directly to the actor/movie/show/etc from IMDB.

https://theringer.com/imdb-message-boar ... .bczbrs75w

That article makes it sound like anything but unclear.

This sucks.

I really enjoyed their forums. There were a number of movies I didn't "grasp" (such as 2001: Space Odyssey) that I would go to the forums to read up on to understand the plot or movies that I would read to find other people's theories (such as Edge of Tomorrow). Yeah, there was garbage posts (of course), but I found the forums to be quite good.

This makes me sad.

It was a damned good source of info on obscure movies that might be otherwise forgotten. Hell, sometimes you'd see a director or writer or actor interacting with people on the movie's forum.

Friggin' IMDB. A huge source of info was lost. I hope one of those archive sites has it.

Wow. Apparently the regular deletion of older threads was a "feature". The original developer of the Imdb forums writes:

Groupthink dominates, outsiders are shunned, filter-bubbles prevail. I thought that an interesting solution to this would be to actively expire user posts. IMDb already had a system of user reviews for more static user content attached to database entries. The boards were for conversation - so we'd just periodically remove older content, and make no secret about it. This should stop the entropy lock-down, and also give us a mechanism to keep a lid on the database / thread size to help with performance. Everything should stay fresh and sparkling and self-rejuvenate.

The dumbification continues.

The user's own rated movies list was now made practically useless (it was downgraded a few years ago, but the recent change is far worse). No more list view, no more sorting by name, or release year (uh, "US release year" since the downgrade a few years ago), or number of Imdb votes, or Imdb score, no more pagination, and more.

Also, movie vote details made more awkward to use.

Imdb guy says it's

part of the work to modernize and simplify

and

The interface becomes more simple for new customers

BoxOfficeMojo nerfed as well.

Not as bad as some makeovers, but besides the lower density and more Javascript reliance, it removed some types of information.

Ain't progress great.

meerkt wrote:

Imdb is closing its forums for some unclear reason:
http://www.imdb.com/board/announcement

It's a useful site, and a veteran one at that, but a lot of their design and management decisions are puzzling.

Like the redesign a few years ago that, among other things, ruined the list that shows your own movie votes. Instead of showing the real release year it started showing the US-local one. It's also no longer possible to sort by year (but possible by other fields).

Or people's pages, where the credit types (Director, Writer, Misc Crew...) are sorted by quantity rather than by what people are known for. Take Steven Spielberg. First there's Producer credits, then Writer, and only 3rd you get Director. Huh? Thankfully, I think the "self" and "thanks" categories always get relegated to the end, else Spielberg would get Thanks listed before Director.

Sorting methods are often influenced by the desire of the company rather than the customers. For example, you can't sort by rating on the Android app market. That's intentional to give other guys a fair shot whether they deserve it or not. I could easily see movie studios pushing IMDb to make older movies more visible.

Sorting your own votes list.
That's just a case of the modern misguided "less is more", or perhaps, "don't waste one iota of work if it's used by <20%".

Also, what sway would film producers have over Amazon?

meerkt wrote:

Sorting your own votes list.
That's just a case of the modern misguided "less is more", or perhaps, "don't waste one iota of work if it's used by <20%".

Also, what sway would film producers have over Amazon?

I was referring to the original post about IMDb. Amazon will do what they want similarly for whatever reasons benefit them. I find it easy to find justification for missing sorting tools or other annoyances in apps or websites.

Heiwashin wrote:

meerkt wrote:

Also, what sway would film producers have over Amazon?

I was referring to the original post about IMDb. Amazon will do what they want similarly for whatever reasons benefit them.

meerkt’s question about Amazon was in regards to IMDb. Amazon owns IMDb.

They don't necessarily participate in every decision made, and even if they do my point still stands. It's not hard to come up with many reasons why companies do this sorts of things. The same reason music labels used to force radio stations to take songs they didn't want in order to get access to the mega hits. It's all there to push sales how and where they want them.

Heiwashin wrote:

The same reason music labels used to force radio stations to take songs they didn't want in order to get access to the mega hits. It's all there to push sales how and where they want them.

Having some experience in the radio game circa 1981 or so, that was the case. Back in those days AM stations relied on free 45s for their aired tunes (there was no money to buy their own), which meant dancing with the devil with each label's radio rep.

A partial alternative to BoxOfficeMojo:
https://www.the-numbers.com/