ANSWERED: Removing the 'private message' system?

BJ: That's what they're saying. The Private Message system is going to be shut down entirely.

If this is true, I invite anyone who is aware of my work on the FAQ pages and who wishes to keep in contact with me to PM me. We can exchange our personal email addresses. It appears that the IMDb is shutting down our ability to contact/discuss with each other.

Not only is removing private messaging a problem, but it's common for people to have a discussion on a film's message board about a particular aspect of the film, such as an alternate version, before officially submitting it to IMDb. I just don't see why all but a few people would continue to update the site after the shutdown.

If this is true, I invite anyone who is aware of my work on the FAQ pages and who wishes to keep in contact with me to PM me. We can exchange our personal email addresses. Okay...

It appears that the IMDb is shutting down our ability to contact/discuss with each other.You are welcome to join us on Get Satisfaction at https://getsatisfaction.com/imdb/categories/imdb_imdb_contentdata_issues which has been running nicely since 2012.

Questions here are answered faster and the system is better suited to tracking and solving longer term issues too, as well as recording and prioritizing suggestions.

Col

No thanks. You've already made your lack of interest in the actual contributors, quite clear.

Col, are you looking to facilitate some form of private communication in the future, or is it a thing of the past? As much as I hate to see the boards go, I'd venture that the most substantial blow to our forthcoming IMDb experience (in which we get to keep our profiles) will be the sudden and complete inability to engage other, like-minded people on a one-on-one basis, effectively leaving us at the mercy of automated recommendations while narrowing the film discourse down to Facebook-only comments on lists, hardly the most exciting prospect.

I was hoping things would work out for her. She was a good friend of mine.

Exactly what I was thinking. Losing the message boards is universally agreed to be a pretty moronic decision but being unable to message other users is actually criminal. The 'solution' of GetSatisfaction is patently absurd as that is only an alternative to the Contributer Board (and not a very good alternative from my experience of it) but what it is not, is a place to discuss movies, the very things this database is based upon, nor is it a means of communicating with other users. So we will soon be isolated units within the IMDb with no means of communication to others within the database. We will in effect be going back to how things were in 1998 - how in hell is that progress?! The IMDb have mentioned that the people who use the message board and private message system only account for a small percentage of the user traffic overall. But the thing is, they are by in large the best section of users the IMDb has, as they are the database contributers, the film geeks, the genre specialists, i.e. those who spend actual proper time on here. We'll see what happens but for this customer at least, I fear the 'experience' is about to get decidedly worse.

...Frazer
http://www.imdb.com/user/ur1616919/comments