A great disturbance in the Force
On February 3, a user on the TMDb support forum mentioned to me that IMDb was closing their message boards and was wondering if adding some of that functionality to TMDb would be worth my time and effort. I wasn’t sure at the time and it wasn’t until February 5 when I finally chimed in giving those who were asking a tentative yes. Before I dig into some of the meat, I thought I’d share a small story:
I wrote our support forum software back in August 2012. I was convinced bringing something in house where I could control things like authentication, how we linked to and displayed media as well as share actual database and view code was worth it. It also occured to me that if I had all of this tight integration, why not have per movie/tv show/person message boards? So that’s exactly what I did. Bam! And about a week later I was done. Then, 4 years passed, and do you know what? No one used them. When it came time for the big v4 reveal in June 2016, while the support forum was still heavily used the rest of it… wasn’t. So I chucked all that code out. Straight into the bin. Gonzo. Little did I know, all that work would end up paying off, I just had to wait a little longer…
Where was I? Oh yes, 2017. Discussion boards. Like I mentioned, I decided to pull the trigger on this and see what might happen. In the past 10 days, I’ve deployed what I believe to be a pretty kick ass product. I’ve not only restored the individual media discussion pages but also completely re-imagined them and what they are capable of. They’re kind of on steroids now. This is though, the heart of why doing this made sense. I can custom build a product perfectly tailored for this use case that can benefit everyone using TMDb. Hopefully it shows as you give things a spin.
You can find these boards our by clicking the “speech bubble” icon on any movie, TV show or person page, or scroll down to the “Social” panel (as shown above).
There’s a lot of cool features now with more being deployed and completed every day. Some highlights include user hailing, an awesome emoji selector, push notifications througout the entire website for replies (and soon user mentions), discussion and comment quoting as well as jumping to the newest unread post. On the website side I’ve added some new default notification preferences, as well as the option to upload custom avatars so that we don’t have to rely on Gravatar anymore. All of this plus the usual spit and polish for desktop and a proper, official mobile version.
What do I still have planned? Well, collection discussions is a big one (so we can chat about James Bond in more general terms, or perhaps the series of Avengers movies) is coming up next. There’s also a lot of users asking for an ignore user feature, so that will be getting completed as well.
I’d love to see you stop by, I also created what I’ve referred to as the “birds eye view” for discussions here, so you can see what’s going on and jump into a conversation if you’d like.
If you have any questions or requests, stop by the general support forum. It’s been pretty busy lately as you can see, but I try my best to reply quickly.
P.S. Don’t forgot, you can import your exported list from IMDb (ratings, watchlist, etc…) into your account on TMDb!
