Yo, Sages! Venue warning!


Read IMDb's announcement at the top of the page. They are discontinuing the message boards as of the 20th. If we are to continue, we will need a new forum. Time to convene and decide what we wish to do about it.

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by Simian_Jack » Time to convene and decide what we wish to do about it.

Well, well. That had to end some day. But considering the messages are not moderated and there are more efficient social media methods these days, that figures.

I'll open a Facebook group for us. But then everyone would need to have a Facebook account. After that, we can decide to go somewhere else.

What do you guys think? Is everybody ready to change? Well, ready or not, it's time...

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madp, I am unaware of any social media out there that does what the IMDB message boards do, so I don't see how they could be considered "more efficient".

IMDB has boards for literally hundreds of thousands of films, tv shows, actors, directors, etc; there exists no other resource that provides an emulation of that.

Everyone complains about how terrible the trolls are, but trolls can be ignored (ignore user feature).

We are about to lose a magnificent thing, and I just can't see anyone making anything like it ever again :(

If they really go through with this, I hope some hacker (not me, I don't hack or even know how to) takes IMDB's site down out of protest, and it costs Jeff Bezos a lot of money.

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by jpowell180 » madp, I am unaware of any social media out there that does what the IMDB message boards do, so I don't see how they could be considered "more efficient".

IMDB has boards for literally hundreds of thousands of films, tv shows, actors, directors, etc; there exists no other resource that provides an emulation of that.

I said "more efficient" because I was referring to features such as add pictures and embed videos, which now you find in every other online tool.

The tools exist. If the people who run IMDB wanted, they could add to their Facebook profile hundreds of pages, one page for each TV show or movie they cover. So it's not that more efficient tools don't exist, it's that IMDB doesn't want to do the work and have the expense of doing it.

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Wow, that was all of a sudden. That came out of nowhere.

I wonder what's the real reason? It must be some type of money decision. Either they're not making any money off of it or it's not worth the cost or aggravation maintaining that feature. They're very vague and broad in their reasons basically blaming the users disinterest which makes no sense.

I enjoy it. I would imagine millions of people also enjoy using the comment feature. The first thing I do after I watch a movie is check the IMDB page for the rating, the actors and then the comments.

This sounds like complete BS:

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.


If it wasn't providing a "positive & useful" experience people simply wouldn't use it. Since there's still millions of people placing comments it must still be providing a "positive & useful" experience.

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Go to " Dr Who 2005 on IMDB" there you will find a petition to save the boards ,sign it !;!!

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Hoping to watch The Werewolf tonight and take notes.

I have no ideas as yet where to go. If everyone agrees that we should continue, we'll need a place with enough traffic that we attract the attention of the locals who ight join. That's the life's blood of the Sages. None of us are original members, we each ran across the group in the midst of some show and thought 'This looks fun'. Without exposure, the group will not last. Perhaps one of us knows a forum dedicated to television?

madp is setting up a Facebook page for now. If needed, we can also meet at my blog - nobody reads it, I hardly use it, and I'm unsure whether there is a character limit on replies. It's not the solution we need, but it's there in a pinch.

Anyway, we've been promised two weeks in which to sort it out.

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by Simian_Jack » I have no ideas as yet where to go. If everyone agrees that we should continue, we'll need a place with enough traffic that we attract the attention of the locals who ight join. That's the life's blood of the Sages. None of us are original members, we each ran across the group in the midst of some show and thought 'This looks fun'. Without exposure, the group will not last. Perhaps one of us knows a forum dedicated to television?

madp is setting up a Facebook page for now. If needed, we can also meet at my blog - nobody reads it, I hardly use it, and I'm unsure whether there is a character limit on replies. It's not the solution we need, but it's there in a pinch.

I admit our new Facebook group would be a temporary solution if we find something better. Or, if some people have reservations about joining Facebook, I can make a blog especially for us. Blogs are very easy to make and that's not the obstacle. The problem with blogs is that a new and unknown blog would practically guarantee that we have no traffic.

On Facebook, on the other hand, if we make an appropriate group description, people are always looking for new pages and group and we can still be found. For instance, I typed "Kolchak The Night Stalker" on the search field and found a group dedicated to the show, full of pictures and posts, so they seem to be pretty active. I even entertained the idea of joining it and posting our comments right there, but then I thought our reviews would be lost in a sea of trivia. And besides, we'd only be staying there for the duration of the show. However, we can still join that group and get people to join ours. I'm sure we']ll find lots of other groups and pages for the next shows we cover.

We need a place which can reflect each show we watch. I was thinking, for example, that the cover picture of the group would be changed depending on the current show we're watching.

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I'll go along with whatever the group decides to do. But I have to admit I can't picture any site being as good as this one, having all the shows we could ever imagine watching and message boards for each one, and knowing millions of people visited the site every day. Even if the board were erased every so often, there was still a lot of good information to be had from them. I'll sign a petition to save it, but I doubt it will do any good. I'll try to finish this show with all of you, but I may have to leave afterward if we're confined to some small website somewhere. I'm getting older and have had to adjust my schedule for more sleep which gives me even fewer hours in a day or week to work with. I'd been thinking about pulling out when the next show comes up, even before I saw the news about the end of the message board era.

Anyway, if you need to find me after the boards are gone, my real name is Greg Lemieux from Lakeland, Florida. I am on Facebook, but I only check it occasionally and haven't posted on it in months. You can also reach me at [email protected]. Later, I can give you my cell phone e-mail if you want it, but I don't want to post it here. I'll keep checking here until the end, and of course I'll still give you my Werewolf review soon.

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by brimfin » I'll try to finish this show with all of you, but I may have to leave afterward if we're confined to some small website somewhere.

Creating a Facebook group is all I can do right now. But if this situation kills our group anyway, then, well, it was good while it lasted. But everything come to an end one way or another.

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