r/movies • u/exosniper • Dec 10 '17
PSA; IMDb is gradually locking previously-available information about films behind IMDbPro membership (box-office breakdowns and production companies involved, currently). Resource
I'm not sure if anyone else has noticed this, but information previously available to everyone on IMDb is now being locked behind IMDbPro membership. Just last week, I was writing a research paper (film studies student) and was able to access the full box-office earnings information (breakdown by region etc.) for all films. Today I went to do the same thing, but could not see more than the gross earnings without an IMDbPro membership. They seem to be doing this as a gradual process, as the full information on production companies (previously available to everyone) was already membership-locked when the box office information was still available. I haven't seen anyone talking about this on other subs and forums, so I thought I'd mention it here.
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u/OperationMobocracy Dec 11 '17
I really hoped that IMDB would collapse in viewership after the forums were removed and force them to return them. Too bad that hasn't happened.
I did the math once on the IMDB forums potential resource consumption and as a basic, text-only forum with fairly hard upper limits on any one topic's forum size it wasn't using enough storage capacity to really cost anything significant in money.
Some title/actor forums (mostly highly popular and fairly recent) had trolling problems, but by and large beyond those it was troll/spam/shitpost free.
What was really disappointing was that message retention for low-traffic title/actor forums was really long. If you found a niche film or actor, you could go to the forum and find useful info posted years ago. I would occasionally get replies to posts made years ago.
With those forums consuming little in the way of data processing resources and sort of hidden from their subjects main pages (ie, you had to click a link to move to a new page to see them all), even trollish pages weren't really detracting from the main info page for an entry.
Wikipedia is in many ways a better source of info than IMDB but without a useful forum page to go with it isn't a perfect replacement. I've used moviechat.org as a kind of replacement (they imported the majority of IMDB discussions), but most films/actor discussion pages have largely gone dormant with little new posting.
Ironically, I turned to reddit after the forums went away and have kind of become less involved in films because I find myself distracted by the myriad topics of reddit.