The post I was going to make before the boards went down

I started out on this board....

...way back when it was a small, closely-knit group of professing Christians -- believers and make-believers -- discussing our hearts out. It was great. I was a baby Christian back then, and the discussions helped me to delve into the Bible and learn more. Even though the discussions could get heated, it was a positive experience.

As the release date for The Passion of the Christ neared, we were inundated with trolls. They took a tight-knit community and turned it into what they gleefully called the "Passion Pit." We had one guy who thought he could tell us the meaning of "666," even though it had eluded all thoughtful scholars for centuries. He'd Googled it, you see, and had gotten the word from that group called "the Higher Critics" -- sort of the Frankfurt School of theology. So we had snark and venom and pompous explanations of the "true" meaning of Leviticus until no sane person could stand it. For that and other reasons, I got out.

I came back, and, Lo! I wished I'd stayed just to see the stuff hit the fan! It must have been glorious! On the Religion board, they later called it "The Purge" -- the place had become such a cesspit that even IMDb (known throughout the Internet Universe as Troll Central) couldn't stand it, and they cleaned house. The Religion and Philosophy boards were created from the rubble. And, of course, the trolls divided themselves between this place and the new religion board.

Ah, for the glory days of this board -- when threads could go on for fifty pages, and people could look back in the archives and find the better discussions after they'd gone dormant for months! It was truly wonderful! And NO posting quotas!

We broke the boards at least once, I remember. They had to shut everything down every few months and add new servers. Then they added the posting quotas just so they could keep up with the demand.

And at one point, the great Col Needham climbed down from his ivory tower and wrote one of his important notices -- this time a total meltdown hissy-fit -- after the boards had become a 5000 pound gorilla on the back of this dainty little information site. It was the information, Colin wanted us to know, that was the whole point of IMDb. "Some people think it's the Message Boards," he huffed.

That's right -- Colin has always wanted to get rid of the Message Boards. And now's his chance.

Well, they're not what they were. Only a few of us remember those days. They're not what they could have been if Needham had only had a little interest in keeping the trolls out and using the latest technology.

But the joke's on him. I can find anything I want information-wise on Wikipedia, Google, or the various movie's websites. I can look up any actor, any movie, anything without ever using IMDb.

Thank you for your indulgence if any of you read this far. And may I suggest that you simply look up your IMDb-type info elsewhere in the future. I'm told that even the IMDb-Pro side has become outdated, and all the cool actors are getting info at another source. I'm hoping Colin has a long time to realize he should have taken the Message Boards seriously.

Unfortunately, he won't be contemplating it while studying to how to be a pig farmer and actually becoming useful to society -- he'll probably be boring people with how he used to be important while sipping gin and tonics at his Italianate villa, the dirty....