If the IMDb message boards were reinstated

Both.

Would you go back? Probably. I guess it depends on how moderated it is. Hate sites that are ''trigger happy'' at banning.

Would there have to be certain conditions for you to go back? Ya, ALL the old message boards *have to be reinstated*. One of my favorite things to do there was just perusing movie/tv show boards & read old boards of stuff I haven't seen in a while. Would spend literal hours there whenever I was bored.

Would you still come here? Yes. General Discussion is one of my favorite places to be.

Would you do both? Most definitely.

I would do both, but if the individual movie, TV threads became as active as they used to be then I would probably spend more time over there.

Here for GD.

There for individual films.

Yeah. The IMDb forums were better than this forum in every way except for three things:

This forum has better moderators. The ones on IMDb had nonsensical moderation tactics, like indiscriminately deleting a user's entire posting history as "punishment." It didn't "punish" the user at all, because the user already knows what all he has posted, but it potentially screwed up a bunch of threads for everyone else because of all of the deleted posts, including ones that were complete innocuous. You can still see the effects of that bullshit when reading through old archived IMDb threads here.

This forum has the "trending" section, which is a great idea that IMDb never had. It adds site-wide visibility to all recent forum posts, even ones on subforums that get very little traffic.

This forum has a built-in notification system for when someone replies to you. IMDb only had an option for email notifications for replies to your posts, which wasn't even very reliable.

Other than those three things:

- IMDb had drastically more traffic.

- It used standard BBcode along with shortcut buttons you could use to automatically insert markup code into your post.

- It had 4 different thread viewing modes (thread, flat, inline, and nest).

- It had an ignore function that worked properly (the one here can ignore people who you don't have on ignore; it can even ignore your own posts).

- It had avatars and signature lines.

- It had precise time stamps for each post, and it indicated if a post had been edited along with the precise time it was edited. That prevented someone from editing their post during an argument and then claiming they said something that they originally didn't, or didn't say something that they originally did.

- A long reply branch here eventually makes the replies extremely narrow and difficult to read. IMDb's forums didn't have that problem. In certain thread viewing modes the page itself would get wider and you'd have to scroll side-to-side, but that was better than trying to read one-column-wide replies. Plus you could just switch to one of the thread viewing modes that didn't have any readability problems at all.

- It didn't have a ridiculously small character limit for posts. I don't know if it even had a character limit at all. If it did, I never encountered it, while I encounter it here all the time.

I'd definitely go back. I'd paste what I said here on there. Or vice-versa, depending on my notifications.

Between the people here I'd miss and the lack of censorship on this site, epitomized most by the politics board, I would still come here. For discussion of specific things, I'd probably favor IMDB when not discussing something controversial.

In general, at first I think boards for specific things here would take a huge hit in population loss, the politics board would be relatively unaffected, and GD would be somewhere in between. Long term, the site would certainly suffer as anyone interested in movie chatting would probably start with IMDB and the population will inevitably dwindle over time without an influx of new posters.

Probably not, it's cosy in here