IMDB (wholly owned by Amazon) made the decision to not only shut down their message board system, but to remove all the data (rather than making them read-only). While this board system badly needed improvement due to excessive unmoderated activity by "trolls," it still served as an invaluable resource for film-lovers, especially those who loved indie, foreign, and classic films (whose discussion boards were in fact often quite active and relatively troll-free). The deleted boards contained a vast amount of film information, created over the years by a vibrant and engaged community.

We ask Amazon / IMDB to restore the IMDB message board system, modified to include an "upvote / downvote" system that will automatically hide-by-default unpopular (troll) posts. We regard it as indefensible that IMDB chose to eliminate the boards rather than make this sole needed (and obvious) improvement. And we intend to, whenever possible, buy goods from sources other than Amazon until the boards are restored.