Post some of your favorite/craziest memories of the IMDb forums!

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There was always the potential for a thread to break out about how the U.S. is the worst country in the world or that it produces the worst movies in the world, and they would usually end up having four figure post counts. Granted, it was the early-to-mid 2000s, i.e. the Dubya/Iraq War years when so many people had axes to grind, but that doesn't totally explain why such threads would end up in the discussion boards for fare like Good Burger and Stomp the Yard.

On a much lighter note, the "1,000 things I learned while watching..." (like "Windex is a good substitute for aftershave" in The Lost Boys) and "This post was deleted because..." (like "because they've gone back to metric without telling us" in Brazil) threads that were in seemingly every movie discussion were always good for cheap laughs.



What I remember is at first everyone seemed cool when the IMDB refuges came here.. but some of them were defensive & feisty and arguing broke out. Those IMDB people didn't stick around, but the rest were cool and well liked.

This thread started out well intentioned but somewhere down the line it got heated: IMDB Assimilation
The ones that were the most vocal about being IMDb immigrants and who tended to stay in their own insular little group instead of making an effort to be part of this community were the problem. Longtime MoFos were quite welcoming to them in the beginning. I seem to recall Yoda even posted a banner welcoming them to the site.

I'm sure there are plenty of IMDb people who quietly came over and started posting without acting super defensive and combative and have integrated into MoFo without anybody even noticing.



The ones that were the most vocal about being IMDb immigrants and who tended to stay in their own insular little group instead of making an effort to be part of this community were the problem. Longtime MoFos were quite welcoming to them in the beginning. I seem to recall Yoda even posted a banner welcoming them to the site.

I'm sure there are plenty of IMDb people who quietly came over and started posting without acting super defensive and combative and have integrated into MoFo without anybody even noticing.
Yup that's all true.



A lot of us old time MoFos also has an IMDB account. I did, though I posted like 3 or 4 times only there. One of those times I disagreed with someone's movie opinion but was nice about it...that person posted to me and said 'Thanks!' and that he was surprised someone on IMDB was actually nice to him. It was a fun place to read but way too many trolls and numpties for my liking.



Vicky's dead-on in her memory, yeah. We really rolled out the red carpet: giant banner, special welcome message explaining the ways the site was different, etc. But people formed immediate cliques and, just as importantly, they brought existing fights right onto the boards. And some of them were mad I didn't ban people based on their say-so, opting instead to judge them exclusively by what they did or didn't do while here.

Honestly, there's been several groups of forum refugees over the years, and while some assimilate better than others, every single one of them expresses some distaste with how things are done, coincidentally with all the ways in which it's different from whatever they were used to before. Forums are about equilibrium, and moving to a new one means suddenly adjusting to a new one. That's tough for people.

But I agree, definitely a lot of much less assuming people who came over without making it a big show, I'm sure.



It's weird that I never really got into the IMDb forums, considering that I was deep into exploring the site back when it was born in the 1990s, and was deep into the film forum subculture as well. My first mainstay was the EW forums back then.

It's a pity that they've closed them, though. Having been a part of several forums for several years and gone through my fair share of migrations, I know the kind of friendships and connections that develop, and it's sometimes hard to move on. The "close for no reason" angle was also key when RT closed their own boards. It just seems that the people in the upper levels don't really understand how forums work. I remember that RT buried the forum on a small link under a barely used menu, and then argued that there were no new people coming in.
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The ones that were the most vocal about being IMDb immigrants and who tended to stay in their own insular little group instead of making an effort to be part of this community were the problem. Longtime MoFos were quite welcoming to them in the beginning. I seem to recall Yoda even posted a banner welcoming them to the site.

I'm sure there are plenty of IMDb people who quietly came over and started posting without acting super defensive and combative and have integrated into MoFo without anybody even noticing.

Same thing happened when OT attempted to migrate to RLM forums. They attempted to flex edge-lord style on the mods ("playing the dozens") and hit the wall when they got modded.



A lot of us old time MoFos also has an IMDB account. I did, though I posted like 3 or 4 times only there. One of those times I disagreed with someone's movie opinion but was nice about it...that person posted to me and said 'Thanks!' and that he was surprised someone on IMDB was actually nice to him. It was a fun place to read but way too many trolls and numpties for my liking.
My thoughts about them in a nutshell as well. It's no surprise IMDB got rid of them since too many trolls made it a toxic environment. Besides, with every movie having its own subforum, how the heck do you moderate all of them properly?

Except for the obvious of low traffic making them unviable, this could also explain why forums, comment sections, etc. are less common.



Definitely. Even a moderately-sized one like this is pretty hard to moderate comprehensively. I still, on a semi-regular basis, get some complaints about how I removed X but not Y, when I've literally never seen Y. People assume the mods see everything and therefore everything there must have been explicitly signed off on, but that isn't ever the case.

IMDB's forums were great for trading information and theories, but it was not a community in any sense of the word, so I'm not surprised its diaspora has failed to glom onto any one particular place afterwards. Anyone whose online identity or conversation style "evolved" in that particular petri dish isn't going to have any idea how to socialize in an actual community.



Registered User
Definitely interesting hearing about other website's forums from you folks...sub-forums, you say? The Internet cretins under the stairs? *shrieks!!!*



Except for the obvious of low traffic making them unviable, this could also explain why forums, comment sections, etc. are less common.
People want to herd around the same services. We want one-shop stops. If you want buy something, it's Amazon. If you want to shout something at the universe, use Twitter. If you want video, it's YouTube. If want to search, it's Google.I don't think that anyone ever really cared that much whether VHS or Betamax/Blu Ray or HD-DVD was that much better, they just wanted a common format. For anonymous internet conversations, Reddit is the King of the Hill. They won the franchise war (there is a subreddit for everything) and now everything is Taco Bell. Discord is now on the rise, but for now, that's the watering hole.



Probably wouldn't be a bad idea to send some invites to some r/movies posters to check out this place and get some new blood.



Registered User
Oh yes, "The Bush Banter"! Good times, good times. Not for the country, mind you. But good times for Internet war...

There was always the potential for a thread to breakout about how the U.S. is the worst country in the world or that it produces the worst movies in the world, and they would usually end up having four figure post counts. Granted, it was the early-to-mid 2000s, i.e. the Dubya/Iraq War years when so many people had axes to grind, but that doesn't totally explain why such threads would end up in the discussion boards for fare like Good Burger and Stomp the Yard.

On a much lighter note, the "1,000 things I learned while watching..." (like "Windex is a good substitute for aftershave" in The Lost Boys)and "This post was deleted because..." (like "because they've gone back to metric without telling us" in Brazil) threads that were in seemingly every movie discussion were always good for cheap laughs.



Registered User
Yes sir, definitely funny how those corporate douchebags sabotage themselves (and again, for *no reason whatsoever*!!!

It's weird that I never really got into the IMDb forums, considering that I was deep into exploring the site back when it was born in the 1990s, and was deep into the film forum subculture as well. My first mainstay was the EW forums back then.

It's a pity that they've closed them, though. Having been a part of several forums for several years and gone through my fair share of migrations, I know the kind of friendships and connections that develop, and it's sometimes hard to move on. The "close for no reason" angle was also key when RT closed their own boards. It just seems that the people in the upper levels don't really understand how forums work. I remember that RT buried the forum on a small link under a barely used menu, and then argued that there were no new people coming in.



Registered User
I suppose I should introduce myself to you, Mr. Yoda, since you are one of the people who run the place! Seems like a really cool website thus far--

IAN

Definitely. Even a moderately-sized one like this is pretty hard to moderate comprehensively. I still, on a semi-regular basis, get some complaints about how I removed X but not Y, when I've literally never seen Y. People assume the mods see everything and therefore everything there must have been explicitly signed off on, but that isn't ever the case.

IMDB's forums were great for trading information and theories, but it was not a community in any sense of the word, so I'm not surprised its diaspora has failed to glom onto any one particular place afterwards. Anyone whose online identity or conversation style "evolved" in that particular petri dish isn't going to have any idea how to socialize in an actual community.



Registered User
Do you really run this entire site? Just curious--

IAN

Definitely. Even a moderately-sized one like this is pretty hard to moderate comprehensively. I still, on a semi-regular basis, get some complaints about how I removed X but not Y, when I've literally never seen Y. People assume the mods see everything and therefore everything there must have been explicitly signed off on, but that isn't ever the case.

IMDB's forums were great for trading information and theories, but it was not a community in any sense of the word, so I'm not surprised its diaspora has failed to glom onto any one particular place afterwards. Anyone whose online identity or conversation style "evolved" in that particular petri dish isn't going to have any idea how to socialize in an actual community.



I suppose I should introduce myself to you, Mr. Yoda, since you are one of the people who run the place! Seems like a really cool website thus far--
Thanks.

Do you really run this entire site? Just curious--
Yep.



... The "close for no reason" angle was also key when RT closed their own boards. It just seems that the people in the upper levels don't really understand how forums work. I remember that RT buried the forum on a small link under a barely used menu, and then argued that there were no new people coming in.
I remember that. We all saw the writing on the wall though. It was incremental. And then one day it was all just ... gone. At least that Swedish (?) guy at the Corrierino gave us some kind of heads up. But there we were. Once more lugging our meager possessions in tatty old cardboard boxes. Having to scrub our undies in the sink at McDonalds.

O cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right!



I remember that. We all saw the writing on the wall though. It was incremental. And then one day it was all just ... gone. At least that Swedish (?) guy at the Corrierino gave us some kind of heads up.
You mean Epistemophobia? He wasn't Swedish, I'm afraid...



You mean Epistemophobia? He wasn't Swedish, I'm afraid...
I'm not sure that was the person's name. I forget who ran the place. Maybe it was Epistemophobia. I thought they were from Europe somewhere. Oh well. Still seems like an arbitrary thing to have done.