I was wondering how the heck does what is really a cult film have only two pages of threads?
Then I noticed they only go back to January of this year. IMDb must have had a Donnie Darko entry before that, don't you think? So it must have gotten rid of thousands of comments. Any input?
I've noticed a lot of the boards on here don't go back nearly as far as I'd expect for an ages-old site like this one and I was wondering the same thing.
shareI don't know why they did this, but I can confirm that I was around here a couple years ago and there where many threads
shareI think they just get rid of threads if there are no recent comments. Very annoying and stupid as it destroys the whole value of the forums. Other websites that run on comments don't go through and prune them like this. It makes everything more superficial and trivial.
shareTo be fair, how many other boards have as many sub-boards as IMDb? Think about it. Every single movie that has ever existed has a board.
And let's be real here, message boards are trivial.
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Many movies have no comments on their board and it is trivial to keep all the comments. They can be heavily compressed typically and text is not that demanding a form of media anyway. Everything is trivial using your philosophy including movies, books and music. I don't see any legitimacy value to your argument. If they can not afford to back up text like many other forums such as slashdot and the guardian, they are pathetic. They just do this arbitrarily and ruin the forums by pruning it down to nothing and driving people away. It is lame.
shareThey deleted a thread I started just recently pointing out that there is a book by a Jim Cunningham called Nudity and Christianity which is an odd coincidence - perhaps the writer and director knew of the book and used it as inspiration for the character who is a kiddie porn collector and leads a kind of cult around the fear and love dichotomy which is in the Bible. Of course it isn't a realistic portrayal of Christianity or the real Jim Cunningham who was promoting social nudity or nude family recreation, not sexual exploitation of children.
shareThreads get deleted as time goes by. Automatic house cleaning.
The new home of Welcome to Planet Bob: http://kingofbob.blogspot.ca/
Well, that's sad, because then my immortal words aren't so immortal any longer. :(
shareYou can always do what I did and start putting the "important" stuff on a blog or something. It's mostly become a host site for my podcast now, but when we did a Donnie Darko show I used it to write a little article that uses the Philosophy of Time Travel to explain the movie.
I knew we wouldn't stay on topic long enough on the show itself to explain the whole thing, so I did it on my blog instead. Plus more people are likely to read the link than listen to the whole hour of the podcast. :P
The new home of Welcome to Planet Bob: http://kingofbob.blogspot.ca/
I agree that it's a big failure on IMDBs part. It's just bad.
Ideally you would want to archive every thread to increase traffic and also have a "like" function similar to reddit so you can see a list of best / most informative threads here and ideally even upvote comments so they are higher up.
Basically IMDB is ancient tech.
Ah, yes. One of the things I have some trouble with is that you can only know a comment has posted if it is a direct reply to your post. I have gone on my profile several times and tried to go back through my comments to see what else has been posted below me that I wasn't alerted to because it was a reply to someone else's comment. Sort of like what Yahoo does with comments on its story, or Facebook ... you are alerted if something else is added to the thread.
shareYeah that is a good point as well!
shareEven that isnt reliable either. I get the email notifications if someone replies to one of my posts, but I've seen plenty of replies that I never got an email about in the forums that I check regularly. I dont know why it sometimes notifies me and sometimes doesnt.
shareI know, it breaks my heart when they do this. Years of discussions erased just like that. I actually got an account on this site 10 years ago just so I could discuss this movie and now all those threads are gone. Ok server space costs money but still!
shareThey delete "unused" treads.
And they also randomly wipe all of the comments from individual users, every now and then.
It happened to me at least once.
That's why tons of treads look like Swiss Cheese.
Probably some bug in their crappy old system from the 1990s.
I don't think it's a bad thing at all. I don't need to read comments from 2007. What's there to say? Threads get deleted all the time, nothing wrong with that.
That's the same as deleting your old documents and similar. No one is using old threads anyway, so why keep up pace with them?
IMDB deletes thread who hasn't had responses in a while, they want to keep it fresh and current.
I do think, though, that the points that several people have made, that IMDb has a dinosaur system, might be pertinent, if I understand the comments correctly. I find it disappointing that I don't know comments have been added if they don't reply directly to my comment, unless I go back to the question to see what else has been added. That's how I found your comment just now, for instance.
Do you know, do people routinely go back to their comments to see if there has been any replies to other people's comments below theirs? Maybe though a system like Facebook's would be nice, where you know if anything has been added.
Don't know since I haven't started any threads but isn't there a system where you can overview your threads and responses to them? It should be at least..
But I go back frequently to see responses to my comments, don't think there is another way to see them. I don't mind it but it does feel outdated. Maybe they should do a Facebook system?
Speaking of wiping out comments, you should check out the "Shrek 2" board. There's no fresh comments there. What's up with that?
Your comment seems a little short-sighted considering that a film remains the same as when it was released and people age into seeing it for the first time. I would love to be able to read comments from people when they first saw the film. In addition, people only now seeing Donnie Darko for the first time, like, say, 15 year olds, may like the idea of seeing "ancient" threads from 2001. I would prefer that IMDb keep these boards into perpetuity. Server space for text is cheap, cheap, cheap. If it's their software, fix it! There's no excuse.