
How I built the IMDb message boards, in 2001 - yread
https://www.beatworm.co.uk/blog/internet/imdb-boards-no-more
======
bshimmin
_I once spent an evening in a darkened restaurant patio overwhelmed to tears
as a kind man explained to me his young daughter, hospital-bound and dying of
cancer, had used the Harry Potter IMDb boards as her main social life in her
last year, and how much that had meant to him and her._

For those of us who have fought an existential struggle throughout our careers
with the random pointlessness of many of the things we get paid well to build,
I think we can take a great measure of hope from this part of the story.

Thank you for writing this long post, Colin, and thank you for the IMDb
message boards.

~~~
anc84
Providing topical community services can be extremely rewarding but at the
same time extremely tiring. I run a website dedicated to something technical
from the nineties. There is a bunch of attention-whoring weirdos but the 2-3
people per year telling you how much the community and your interaction
matters to them makes all up for it.

To me forums are still the best thing about the internet. Forums with simple
threads, post count based user titles, avatars, nicknames and strict topics.
You can be yourself in many different ways, one "persona" per topical forum.
No one would know who you are or care about your sex, race or political
orientation. anc84 is me here for example, nothing matters but the content of
my posts.

~~~
iamatworknow
>nothing matters but the content of my posts

But the permanence of those posts can bite you in the ass. Over time your post
history will grow and if it's accessible to others (and they care enough to
dig through it) they can potentially use what you said 6 months, a year, ten
years ago against you. If you happen to let slip your real identity, all of
that history is now linked to the "real life you" and if you said anything
under the false expectation of anonymity you're screwed.

This is one of the reasons I don't think I could ever go into politics. A
savvy opponent would only need to do a few google searches, research my online
history, find some stupid shit I said when I was 17 years old on LiveJournal
or whatever, and there goes my campaign.

~~~
jablan
I don't get why you would have to worry, unless you are some kind of
psychopath or sociopath and it can be seen from these posts? We all say/write
stupid things when we are 17, why would it affect your career in any way? Look
it other way, would you really judge a politician based on what they said on
some website when they were 17?

~~~
iamatworknow
I was a teenager in the early to mid-2000's, so of course I was playing video
games and throwing around slurs and insults and what have you -- words I've
grown out of saying "for the lulz", of course, because I know they can hurt
people and I honestly don't get anything out of saying them. But if you look
hard enough there's a record of that online, linked to my real life identity,
and in the court of public opinion that record would overrule any actual
beliefs or policy positions I have as an adult. "This guy says he stands for
gay rights, but look at how much he casually used the f-word as an insult on
this Counter Strike forum."

This isn't something previous generations have had to experience in politics
or in the workforce and it'll only get more ugly with time. The kids today who
are in their teens are churning out exponentially more troubling data than I
ever did. Just imagine what kind of political mudslinging fodder that will
provide in 20 years.

~~~
andyana
This holds me back from seeking public office as well...

Reminds me of this NDP politician in Calgary that had some photo of her
surface in which she was holding a joint and giving the flag the finger. It's
completely irrelevant (and could have been a joke for all we know), but I'm
sure the fact that it surfaced stung her like a thousand bees.

I believe at some point in time we will have stop caring about these sorts of
things because eventually everyone will be affected to some degree, but that
time is not now.

------
bungie4
As an old timer that was around pre original dot com boom, this made me smile.
It was a simpler, horrible and fantastic time - in hindsight.

------
alex_hitchins
I enjoyed reading this. These retrospection articles always make me think that
somehow life as a dev was somewhat better back in the day. Perhaps it's just
old age bring on cynicism, but I feel like I enjoyed development more a decade
ago.

~~~
colinstrickland
I'm not sure about better, but it was certainly a very different set of
disciplines

~~~
Rustydave
And was the pay better back then than it is now? Just curious

~~~
mikestew
Software salaries have always been good, usually a bit better than middle
middle class. For contrast, I've worked as an auto mechanic. Good, middle-
class living that. Left that for software, made a bit more money doing
software.

After a bit, but still before the dot-bomb, I went to work for Microsoft.
Salary was shit, but the stock options were still enticing back then. All the
dot-bombs were paying better, so MSFT upped the salaries. Based on performance
reviews, I was apparently a pretty good employee, so the mileage of many might
vary. But after one review I got a 35% salary bump that year in an effort to
keep MSFT competitive.

One more comparison: my responsibilities aren't much greater than they were
back in the day, but I'd say I live a more comfortable lifestyle now than I
did then.

tl;dr: it's super-hard to make direct comparisons, but I'd say salaries are
better now than back-in-the-day.

------
mwest
Thanks for taking the time to write this! Thoroughly enjoyed reading it. It's
been some time since I've even thought of mod_perl... A graph of whimsy:
[http://www.securityspace.com/s_survey/data/man.201701/apache...](http://www.securityspace.com/s_survey/data/man.201701/apachemods.html?mod=cGVybA==)

------
ars
That was great to read.

As soon as he said mod_perl I knew where things were headed. Having used both
mod_perl and PHP (and ColdFusion - anyone remember that?), perl was just a
nightmare to use well for this.

Then when he talked about the custom templates written in perl? That's why PHP
was invented, because at its core it is a template language. (i.e. the pages
are HTML, with code inside them, rather than code, and HTML is treated as a
string.)

I suspect that if the forums had been written in PHP they would not be getting
shut down right now.

And yes, I know that people love to hate on PHP (including the author who said
he disliked PHP because he didn't use it). But sometimes the tools you choose
make a huge difference.

It was a great writeup though, really brought back memories.

~~~
ukyrgf
I thought it was odd that he says the cool kids were using Perl. I taught
myself Perl from a book in the late 90s and couldn't find any kind of
welcoming community on the internet, while PHP was the complete opposite.
Since it was made for the web it flourished there; PHP even had user comments
on its own documentation!

~~~
vvanders
Yup, PHP back then had one of _the best_ documentation pages out there. It's
hard to explain how big a deal it was(esp before the days of stack overflow).

~~~
aeontech
Absolutely! I honestly think that if PHP didn't have those incredibly
accessible documentation pages, it would never have taken off in the way it
did. It was StackOverflow before there was StackOverflow.

------
b__d
What a nice read, thank you very much for sharing!

------
misiti3780
If everyone is so concerned about these boards going away, why doesnt someone
just export the entire database and re-import it into some open source forum
software so people can just continue to comment there.

I dont think this is trivial, but it could be done with some effort.

~~~
tastythrowaway
but who will pay for the bandwidth?

~~~
misiti3780
how much could a bill like this possibly be per month ?

if people are so interested in keeping the forums, you could try to ask for
donations ?

~~~
tastythrowaway
I would guess it's expensive enough to get cut, right? People could donate,
sure. It would still need dedicated resources. It's a popular enough service
to need high concurrency and reasonably high availability - at least for peak
usage, like when the new trailer for the next great trilogy drops.

------
tony2016
The threaded replies model was stupid. If a post had 20 replies, I have to
click 20 times. Each click to show one reply. Many of the replies were
moronic. I ended up just reading the main posts only.

I used many threaded discussion software. The one IMDb used was the most
annoying. I have never seen it used on any other site. I guessed it must have
been developed in-house and wondered why they never enhanced it.

~~~
exodust
I guess you never noticed the "nest" link to change the view...

[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0261392/board/nest/132924312?p=1](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0261392/board/nest/132924312?p=1)

~~~
tony2016
I didn't after all these years! They should have made it the default. I mean
who prefers to click more than they need to!

------
mccolin
Reading this really brought me back -- to my earliest days as a developer and
to the many hours I'd spent on the IMDb boards! Thank you!

------
facepalm
Nice read, although I have to say, 2001 I took my first job as a web
developer, writing Java apps that would run on Tomcat. Back then Java was a
revelation after fumbling with perl - the experience that code would actually
work the first time it was run was amazing... (these days I am tired of Java,
though).

------
calewis
Fascinating and well written. Thank-you.

