There are less than 20 board topics on here (including one deleted thread). How can this movie be as great and phenomenal and classic and have such few posts?!! there used to be be PAGES on here. What's up, IMDb?
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The snowflake makes it cold, cold, cold. Set temperature makes it hold, hold hold.
I will watch it again tonite!
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Good Q. On the other hand, this flopped at the box office.
shareIMDb purges inactive threads after a period of time. That, and it's become nearly taboo to discuss important social and philosophical questions in public (or private).
But I'll be happy to discuss any aspect of the film you'd like.
That's the most you'll ever get out of me Wordman. Ever. -Eddie Wilson
I don't think IMDb purges inactive threads over a period of time because I have stuff that I posted 7+ years ago that just got a reply this year that I had completely forgotten about. It's weird, and kind of embarrassing, things that I have posted over the years and forgot about.
You can't fight in here! This is the War Room!
I too am embarrassed by some things I've written in the past. But imdb definitely does purge threads. In your case, it's possible that others were making posts periodically and it was enough to keep the thread alive.
Is this to be an empathy test?
There does seem a point about a few years ago where IMDB got a lot more aggressive about purging message boards of older messages. I don't really understand the heuristic around what gets deleted, as like you, I've gotten replies to messages posted *years* ago on low-traffic topics.
My guess is that there's some minimal level of retention allowed for all boards, so low traffic boards are able to retain some messages for long periods of time.
I do think they are too aggressive overall in purging boards relative to the amount of actual disk storage they actually consume, especially as storage has gotten cheaper and IMDB more commercial.
I'd wager that most messages are less than 1 kB of text, so a board with 100 top-level comments, each with 10 replies would only be a megabyte of storage. Even if you assume an overhead of 50% for indexing and metadata, you're still only at 1.5 MB per forum.
Wikipedia says IMDB has about 11 million main entries (titles and people, including episodes). Even though episodes don't have their own boards, if you use that figure with the above 1.5 MB per board, it's still a relatively paltry (by enterprise storage standards) of 16.5 TB of data for board entries.
And the reality is its likely much lower -- a huge number of main topics have 10 or fewer forum topics, probably with 5 or fewer replies, and including episodes for TV shows greatly inflates the overall number since they don't have their own forums. The 16.5 TB number is probably too high by half.
And they're owned by Amazon, which means they likely have access to their EC2 cloud storage platform, making the storage costs even lower.
They must delete old threads after a period of time. I was looking back through my old posts and saw that a hilarious thread that someone had posted in the Good Will Hunting board, claiming that there were satanic symbols on the chalkboard and that it was part of a Hollywood satanic conspiracy, has been deleted. I was hoping to reread mine and others comments from years ago about that, because I felt like a laugh, but it's gone.
"Boy that was really exciting. I bet you're a big Lee Marvin fan aren't ya."