IMDb message boards

» see imdb.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

i did not use the imdb message boards. by '07 i was on linux at university in ankara, using imdb the way most people did: to look up a release year or a cast list, click out. the boards under each title page sat one tab beneath my normal use of the site. they were not visible from any path i was on.

imdb itself started in '90 as col needham's personal hobby on usenet (rec.arts.movies), moved to the web in '93 as the cardiff internet movie database, and got bought by amazon in april '98 for around 55 million. the message boards were added later. the exact launch date is not in the public record but they were a normal site feature by '02. every movie or person page got a board attached.

the model was simple. you had an imdb account, you posted under your username, the threads were chronological with no real moderation beyond a low-effort report-this-post link. the boards under big releases were huge. the boards under cult titles were small and persistent. some active members posted under the same username on the same board for ten years.

in february '17 imdb gave users two weeks of warning that the boards would be turned off on february 20. the reason given was that the boards were no longer producing a positive experience for most users while costing too much to moderate. the explanation read like a normal corporate retirement note. the backlash was loud and short. an online petition collected around 8000 signatures and got ignored.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how the boards worked ~

i was reading about this in retrospectives more than from memory. the boards under any major release pulled people who cared enough about a film to argue about it after watching. board culture varied by genre. horror titles had deep-cuts viewers swapping recommendations, and the bigger franchises (lord of the rings, harry potter) sustained subcultures with running jokes and recurring posters.

the small-board case was different. obscure or low-traffic titles had boards with maybe twenty posters total across the whole life of the title. these often functioned as a single multi-year conversation between a handful of people. moderation was almost absent on those boards because there was nothing to moderate.

~ what really happened ~

in those days. the announcement gave a final post-by date of february 3, '17, with the boards removed on the 20th. archive.org's wayback machine and moviechat.org both ran scrapers in the two-week window and captured most of the high-traffic boards. moviechat continues to host the archived threads and runs a successor message-board site under its own domain (close enough). that successor is smaller than the original imdb forums ever were but it exists.

imdb itself is still online and very much alive as a reference. the boards are the missing layer. clicking from a 2014 search result that mentioned an imdb board thread now resolves to a normal title page with no comment surface attached. the path from a movie's release to a community discussion about it that the imdb boards used to fill got fragmented across reddit and letterboxd, with side conversations on twitter. honestly, it is a less coherent space than the boards were, even at their worst.

credit to Mags, who could not remember when they died.

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