I'm very disappointed right now. I just found out that one of my favorite websites, the imdb.com, which I use several times per day for research closes down their message boards
.
This is their dumb excuse: 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.
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. IMDb's Facebook page (
https://www.facebook.com/imdb" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;) and official Twitter account (
https://twitter.com/imdb" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;) have an audience of more than 10 million engaged fans. IMDb also maintains official accounts on Snapchat (
https://www.snapchat.com/add/imdblive" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;), Pinterest (
https://www.pinterest.com/imdbofficial/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;), YouTube (
https://www.youtube.com/imdb" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;), and Tumblr (
http://imdb.tumblr.com/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;).
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.
It's not a small group, it's a large group of movie buffs and people who try to find certain movie titles.
The only alternative listed on the Facebook imdb page is this strange website:
https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/16227-dark-passage" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
BUT they don't have a message board.
I was a member since 2002, it was my "working tool" at the movie archives in Hamburg, Germany, when I was still answering readers' letters of CINEMA magazine. Sometimes I hate change!