The Site Suggestions Thread

I thought that it would be a good idea to have a thread where we could all make suggestions regarding what improvements and changes need to be made to the site, and even some suggestions regarding the direction in which the site should go. These suggestions are, of course, a matter of opinion, so no one has to agree with anyone else but everyone should keep civil.

Here are my suggestions:

1. Take things slowly regarding the individual message boards - possibly even temporarily disable posting there. I understand that it's exciting that there's a new site that has the potential to be as good as (or even better than) IMDb's old boards, but it's important to take the time to get things right.

Importing archived IMDb boards has complicated matters significantly, making it important to tread carefully. The sheer complexity that this decision brings with it requires great care. First of all, we don't yet know all of the results of "mixing" new posts and threads with old ones. There are many complexities here.

If you make a response to an old archived IMDb thread whose author hasn't registered here, the author will not see your response. It might be hard at times to tell which threads are new and which are archived. MovieChat users do not currently have the ability to "claim" old posts that they wrote on IMDb and have them listed under their profiles. All current archived threads only have 9 responses max (as only the first page of each thread was archived, and the responses on pages 2-onwards are missing), making the current archived version of long, multi-page threads incomplete. And that's just a few off the top of my head. There are likely other complexities involved as well.

I don't mean to be critical. This site is a noble and exciting experiment. But an experiment it is. And I think it's best to wait until all of the kinks have been ironed out to actually begin posting in the boards for each movie, show, actor, etc. This site is in "beta mode", after all.

It might even be a good idea to consider making the IMDb post archive a separate section of MovieChat (separate from the new forums, but still easily accessible, perhaps even with an easily-accessible link from each MovieChat board to its corresponding archived IMDb board) and disabling replies in it (making it a true archive of the IMDb boards, perhaps even one that could be updated over time by adding data from the archived IMDb boards that I and others have downloaded and/or archived on websites such as the Wayback Machine). That way, this site would have a twofold purpose: firstly to replace the void that the IMDb forum's deletion left with the new MovieChat forums, and secondly to archive all surviving discussions from the IMDb boards (as they were, unaltered and without "cross-pollination" from new posts in the MovieChat forum) for posterity. This is just a suggestion, of course, but I think it might be worth considering. It would certainly reduce some of the complexities involved with combining an archive of an old forum with a new forum.

2. Don't try to compete with IMDb. Of the various sites currently being touted as replacements for the IMDb forums, The Movie Database (TMDb) is one of the most popular. However, I find it to have a major disadvantage that makes it inferior to what this site is seemingly currently striving to be: it's trying to be another IMDb. If you go to TMDb, you will find pages with information about various actors, movies, etc; user ratings, etc, in addition to their discussion boards. It's truly a movie database (as its name implies). The problem is that we already have one of those. It's called IMDb. And trying to equal or best it when it comes to listing movie and television information (even if such is possible) is pointless and would take a huge amount of effort that could be better spent elsewhere.

I know that there are some here who wish for IMDb to fail or be replaced entirely by another site for deleting the message boards, but this is pointless and petty. I don't like that they deleted the boards, and IMDb lost a great part of what drew me to it by doing so. But as far as living up to its name (Internet Movie Database) it can't be faulted. It's still a great site - for what it is. Its owners just decided that they didn't want to be in the movie forum business anymore - they just want to run a true database and nothing more.

What's IMDb's name? The Internet Movie Database. It's a movie database. A base for data about movies. A library of information (who starred in what movie, how many movies did this or that director make, etc). Now what's this site's name? MovieChat. It's a place to discuss movies. Two different sites with two different purposes. As it should be. In my view, this site should avoid trying to become another IMDb the way that TMDb is doing. It needs to be a movie discussion board, not a movie database.