IMDB- what happened????

I really miss those boards. I'm recovering from a knee injury and watching a ton of Netflix and it was a great source for information/theories on random shows.

I don't know, OP, I just randomly clicked on Jeremy Renner's page and the first thing that came up was trivia and gay rumors. It was like a break in the Matrix leading to DL.

Randomly checked and Marty Feldman's bio and trivia is still there. Exciting stuff about his death from shellfish poisoning awaits you, OP!

It does seem to be random. The page for the British TV show "Let them Eat Cake" used to have a trivia section and now it is gone. I have also noticed that several actors either have no Bio or the bio has been edited to remove personal information. I suppose it is something that can be done on request. The trivia section on "Let them Eat Cake" had a few posts on how poorly the program was received. Perhaps that is why it was removed. The show was a rare bomb for French and Saunders.

I like to update the porn stars pages by putting in fake entries in mainstream work

California passed a law requiring birth dates be omitted at the request of the actors, or something like that.

I wonder why Feldman never had that eye condition taken care of. Was there not treatment for it, or did he like his eyes popping out of his head?

I used to like reading people's individual reviews of movies. It sometimes helped really know if a movie sucks or not.

Where am I supposed to go now if I have some nagging question about a plot hole or some trivial thing in a film I've just watched? IMDB message boards were really the only place for that kind of conversation.

R2, Crap! Jeremy Renner's page is diarrhea even compared to the old format. I don't think I have ever seen a bio page so long or with so many quotes.

He pretty much confirms that he lurks here though. Heh.

Since Amazon is now producing content such as series and movies they removed things that might offend actors and others in the industry that they are now competing in. Also they likely don't want to see bad reviews of their own stuff.

R12, I knew it was a subsidiary of Amazon. That does make sense.

The reason the message boards had to be taken down is that they had become an intense battleground for trolls to try to harm the reputations of new films, in order to make a dent in their box office receipts, and to game the voting stars. There was no way for IMDb to differentiate one kind of traffic from another.

Ahem, no. They were taken down after Amazon bought IMDb because the boards did not generate income and the point of the site is now to generate income. That's it. And the entire redesign is to focus on product. No one gave a shit about the petty squabbles of nitwits.

I liked the reviews of posters as well. Some of them were really good.

There should be a really good movie site/board with reviews, discussion, info and trivia.

R15, that purchase occurred in 1998. Had that been the issue, they wouldn't have waited until 2017, when the message boards became weaponized, to axe it.

The trolls were the worst on the web but those boards were so damn useful nonetheless. Most any question you had about anything got answered almost immediately.

I used to read discussions dating back to the 90s when people were more polite. So gratifying. But they had deleted those as well shortly before removing the boards altogether. Twas fun while it lasted. It was a hard lesson for me, not to get attached to anything on the web as it's all so ephemeral.

Did DL become weaponized?

R20, at a glance it would appear that they're trying. ;)

moviechat dot org has the old boards archived and new posts can be added

r18 Don't you just love it whenever an "Actually,..." douche gets it all wrong completely? So good it ought to be fattening.

I'd forgotten about Let Them Eat Cake, R4. Dawn French actually apologised for how bad it was a few years after it aired.

R9 You'd have to go through hundreds of Reddit comments in the hope that you'd find what you were looking for, whereas before you would only have to click through a few pages (if that) to find the right topic, which could have been as broad as thoughts about the film, to specific like the actors performance, costume, or even accent. You can also find info or thoughts about lots of similar films on the message boards. Although a few copycats have emerged (Moviechat, IMDb archive,TMDb discussion boards etc) none of them generate the same amount of traffic as IMDb. I was really excited about discussing Ready Player One but was dismayed that even a week after release, only a handful of topics could be found on Moviechat. Reddit, although active, is extremely disorganized and usually has discussion for only the most recent or popular films. It really is a shame.

Long time IMDB poster here.

Over time, the boards became completely invaded and overrun by 4chan, Reddit and Stormfront trolls and bored teenagers using the site to camp out. Also, like R14 said, it was being used as a tool by people (namely, the Alt Right, Neo-Nazis, MRAs, and IP fanboys) to organize downvote/upvote campaigns, boycotts and fake negative reviews at the IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes and YouTube. They were so effective that by 2017, the ratings system at the IMDB had become completely skewed in a way never seen before. Some movies were getting 1.0s or solid 10s weeks before they were even screened by audiences or critics.

The boards had become so bad that something like 95% of the posters of any popular release hadn't even seen the movie or TV show in question. They would just camp out and makes hundreds of posts ranting about "liberal SJW Hollywood forcing blacks, gays, women down everyone's throats", attacking the latest Marvel or DC movie, or screaming about some controversy (often manufactured by trolls or overblown by social media or TMZ). When they weren't doing that, they were spreading disinfo. For example, on the Ghostbusters board, MRA trolls were spreading disinfo that feminists were threatening to kill a popular YouTube critic's wife and kids for not liking the movie.

A lot of psychos also overran the boards. When I say psychos, I really mean it. I'm talking about Buffalo Bill, Rupert Pupkin level of insanity. Two of them spent years religiously posting on the Dead Calm boards arguing with everyone that Nicole Kidman's character clearly "enjoyed" being raped. Straw Dogs and Irreversible had a large number of rape apologist threads and posts asking people to share the "hottest rape scenes." On the Ghostbusters forum, there was a poster who--going by the post history and time stamp--posted hundreds of comments a day for months on end, morning, noon, and night ranting about how he kept wishing the movie would fail, over and over and over again.

So, to put it bluntly, the boards had gone to complete and total shit by January 2017. Most people by then were not real IMDB users. A tell-tale clue that they weren't was that you'd start seeing questions from posters about actors and movies that could've easily been answered by looking it up at the IMDB. You'd visit, say, the Michael Keaton board and someone would ask, "I just saw him in the new Robocop. What other movies has he been in?" or, my personal favorite, "I just saw this show tonight. Who played the lead's best friend?" This is when you knew that so many IMDB posters weren't actual users and had registered just so they could post at the boards for whatever reason.

If you want to see a great example of how useless the boards had become, below is an archive of the board for A Dog's Purpose right before the IMDB closed. Not one comment was posted by anyone who had actually seen the movie.

R26, so?

Nobody went to IMDB for the ratings IMO.

And what the fuck is weaponized and why should I care?

Nobody even cares about the election fraud and Hillarygate much less a movie website.

You tolls can't let a benign thread go without your Repub propaganda, can you R27?

Morons.

“Most people by then were not “real” IMDB users”

OH MY GOSH! THE HORROR! WHAT IS THE WORLD COMING TO? I CANNOT GO ON!!!

“bored teenagers, using it to camp out”

CAN YOU IMAGINE THE DEPRAVITY!!!

Oh, my sides , my sides. Some people have real problems.

Meant to write trolls, not tolls. Obviously.

R28, No hon, I meant both sides. Trump Russian voting skewing/fraud/whatever and whatever Hillary did with the server.

Why is everybody afraid of the spelling monitors lately? Leave it wrong and tell them to fuck off. We can understand through context.

[quote]R28, No hon, I meant both sides. Trump Russian voting skewing/fraud/whatever and whatever Hillary did with the server.

There is nothing that Hillary did with the server. You can repeat it a million more times it won't make it true. I wonder what possessed you to peddle that bullshit here.

See, I was right. You trolls are way too obvious.

R26 You could make the same case with DL or any number of sites, but the message boards had so much more to offer, especially for classic film and genre fans. Moreover, to this day nothing has taken the place of the talent boards, which was a place where fans of lesser known actors could converge. Also, it was pretty well known that actors and talent would drop in occasionally to converse with the fans. Even more interesting were the behind the scenes guys who were often surprised and delighted that their film had found an audience years later. When the IMDb boards, all that culture was lost and nothing that has popped up has come close to replacing it. It was a huge loss for movie and tv fans everywhere.

The trolls mainly converged in the general boards (which I never visited anyway) and for the first few weeks on a tentpole film's boards. Since I didn't give a shit about Marvel or DC films (still don't) I was largely immune from the worst of it. The ratings argument is also irrelevant. People can still rate films there and skew them however they want (I know Amy Schumer's latest was bad, but is it 3.6 bad...probably not). If anything, the discussion boards helped illuminate the controversy around such films. Most films, we can all agree, are meant to be enjoyed by everyone.

It's sad that the boards closed, but it's even sadder that people think it's better to take away something valuable instead of encourage responsible users to engage the internet with caution (as they would do in real life) and use critical thinking.

R26 Not that many people saw A Dog's Purpose and those who did probably didn't care enough about it to discuss it.

r26 that may have been true about the forums for Donald Trump, The Walking Dead, comic book movies, Star Wars, etc. But many TV shows like The Good Wife, Grey's Anatomy, and classic films, there were still very interesting discussions.

It's a shame that the true TV and film lovers lost out. .

R32, not a troll, just stating something about hackers/bots/trolls in the news most people don’t *really* care about. You could sub in ScarJo’s leaked nudes or the Facebook info leak thing if you’re a fan of Hillary. For the record, I don’t think she did anything wrong either.

There was this one time at IMDB, when Witchiepoo used to discuss George Clooney's undying love for her.

R33, R35, I get what you're saying. But the problem is that regardless of how "nice" and helpful those boards were, the vast majority of the IMDB boards were either ghost towns (because the good posters were abandoning ship) or being overrun by trolls. Many of the forums were also turning into swiss cheese, because when long time members started closing their accounts in disgust and frustration, the IMDB would scrub their entire posting history. So many threads would either disappear or be missing responses.

To make matters worse, the vast majority of trolls and internet campers were responsible for most of the traffic to the forums overall. Yes, there were some "good boards" but they only constituted a tiny fraction of traffic. It didn't make any sense for Amazon.com to keep paying gobs of bandwidth to accommodate the few hundred good posters for the sake of the thousands who weren't IMDB users or movie fans and had just registered to troll everyone or pass the time after school.

Lastly, the trolls were also becoming a huge PR nightmare for the IMDB. Remember, the IMDB is supposed to be a respected authority on movies and help promote the latest Hollywood projects. The trolling was getting so bad that it was beginning to make headlines in mainstream media. (See link below from Washington Post) This bad PR not only made the IMDB lose credibility as a trusted source for movie goers, the site was getting in trouble with the studios and people working in the industry.

Keep in mind that I'm not happy that the IMDB forums were shut down. I posted there for well over a decade. But the situation was pretty dire by the end of December 2016, which is why so many people like me finally quit the site by then. I know you both think that the IMDB still had these huge strongholds of fruitful discussion that were worth keeping the forums open, but the writing was on the wall. The forums were on a downward trajectory and they only had a few months left before they collapsed under the weight of their toxicity.

They omitted my Best Actress win at Cannes in '89 for playing that dingo woman. They had to go.

You beat me to it, r37. Poo Shoes was one of the most legendary trolls there, It was amazing to watch. She TERRORIZED those boards.