When you first heard the IMDb boards were shutting down.....

Catman thought, "Yeah, whatever."

had a similar thought at first. but then the realization and despair set in. i may never recover from this loss. i wonder if should send jeff bezos a  PTSD therapy bill.

Few would pay just to use a message board, but they could have made it a function of imdb pro.

Surprised.
But then I realized these companies are not interested in popularity and don't need to worry about money generation.

I was dismayed but not surprised. The trolling on the boards had reached toxic levels.

It sucked because that was pretty much the place to talk about movies even though it was overrun by the trolls/spammers especially in high traffic areas.

but here we are a year later and these boards are good enough. still, the official boards were better on some level as every now and then you would have some quality posts from people in the forums on random movies. basically movies that attracted the kids where overrun by spam but ones that had little to some traffic are usually solid. IMDb should have moderated the boards a bit. I wish they would have at least kept the boards open for specific movies even if they closed down the general Film General/Movie Awards and other generic/high traffic areas.

I wasn't very surprised because the trend of controlling internet speech was becoming an epidemic.

I heard a rumor that old IMDB accounts could be purchased for a few bucks online, which is why the site was overrun by trolls towards the end.