For those that didn’t hear, and I’m admittedly a little late to the party myself, IMDb (Internet Movie Database) will be shutting off their message boards for all users on February 20th. This means that any of you who enjoyed getting to peruse the various message board posts from other movie fans via their website or using their app will be out of luck in roughly another week. Here is the official announcement from IMdb as to why they decided to take this controversial course of action:

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IMDb Message Boards Announcement

IMDb is the world’s most popular and authoritative source for movie, TV and celebrity content. As part of our ongoing effort to continually evaluate and enhance the customer experience on IMDb, we have decided to disable IMDb’s message boards on February 20, 2017. This includes the Private Message system. 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. The decision to retire a long-standing feature was made only after careful consideration and was based on data and traffic.

Increasingly, IMDb customers have migrated to IMDb’s social media accounts as the primary place they choose to post comments and communicate with IMDb’s editors and one another. IMDb’s Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/imdb) and official Twitter account (https://twitter.com/imdb) have an audience of more than 10 million engaged fans. IMDb also maintains official accounts on Snapchat (https://www.snapchat.com/add/imdblive), Pinterest (https://www.pinterest.com/imdbofficial/), YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/imdb), and Tumblr (http://imdb.tumblr.com/).

Because IMDb’s message boards continue to be utilized by a small but passionate community of IMDb users, we announced our decision to disable our message boards on February 3, 2017 but will leave them open for two additional weeks so that users will have ample time to archive any message board content they’d like to keep for personal use. During this two-week transition period, which concludes on February 19, 2017, IMDb message board users can exchange contact information with any other board users they would like to remain in communication with (since once we shut down the IMDb message boards, users will no longer be able to send personal messages to one another). We regret any disappointment or frustration IMDb message board users may experience as a result of this decision.

IMDb is passionately committed to providing innovative ways for our hundreds of millions of users to engage and communicate with one another. We will continue to enhance our current offerings and launch new features in 2017 and beyond that will help our customers communicate and express themselves in meaningful ways while leveraging emerging technologies and opportunities.

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Well, there you have it– it’s happening. This is “real.” And in my humble opinion I think it completely sucks monkey balls. (excuse the slang) Here’s why–It’s a very simple and quick way for any movie buff to see what some other fans are thinking about a given film that allows them to not need “Social Media” to access the information. Believe it or not there are some folks out there who don’t want to be handcuffed into using FB/Twitter, etc, to look up certain data.

Now, before I get carried away, I absolutely understand there’s always been an abundance of rude posts, and egregiously ignoramus posts on their boards over the years. However, I don’t let that ruin the experience for me as a user. If people are getting so sensitive that they feel threatened over a message board format, then I don’t know what to tell ya. Regardless, I wholeheartedly believe that keeping the boards intact outweigh the negatives.

I’m also apparently not alone with this stance as there’s been two different online petitions created that those who want the boards to remain can sign. Here two of the current petitions available online: https://www.change.org/p/imdb-stop-imdb-from-disabling-the-message-boards , https://www.ipetitions.com/petition/petition-to-keep-the-imdb-messageboards-going .

That being said, we’d like to hear from you, our “Mizhollywood.com” community, as to what you all feel is the right choice in this matter. Are you pro message boards or for scrapping them altogether? Thanks for reading!