Removal of key platform could lead to loss of discussion within film community and make site irrelevant
Col Needham, the founder of IMDb, said the message board no longer provided a ‘positive, useful experience’. Photograph: SWNS
Earlier this month, if you visited the IMDb message boards to hash out your feelings on La La Land or to work through your post-Manchester By the Sea despondency, you might have spotted an announcement found at the top of each thread: the message boards are shutting down for good.
“In an effort to continually evaluate and enhance the customer experience on IMDb,” the announcement stated, “we have decided to disable IMDb’s message boards on 20 February 2017.” Citing data and traffic and the boards no longer providing a “positive, useful experience” as reasons, the site’s CEO Col Needham later took to the boards to address the finer points of the shutdown, while confirming that all the content posted to the boards will be removed. “Message boards are always temporary in nature,” he wrote. He encouraged users to copy and archive content, if they want to preserve it.
While IMDb’s message boards have never been a paragon of challenging critical discourse, they have offered an accessible platform through which to have fun talking about cinema. They represented a lively and often bellicose online community that for many will be missed. Film blogger and cinema studies master’s student Caroline Madden has been an active member of the boards for 11 years, first using them as a teenager when she didn’t have friends who shared her passion for film.