How I built the IMDb message boards, in 2001 | Hacker News Reader

How I built the IMDb message boards, in 2001

beatworm.co.uk

290 pointsyread59 comments

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.

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.

What is the topic of the website, if you don't mind?

For the purpose of keeping my online personas separatly, nope ;) It's just a forum with some bells.

I host one for an open source tool (although most replies come from the maintainer). It's mostly technical/support in nature and I really locked down the board (no signatures, no PM etc etc) because we're not really trying to build a community - but the tool really does make a big difference to some peoples lives.

It made enough of a difference to mine to want to give back and start the forum in the first place, such is the power of these things!

Little stories come up now and then through the questions people ask and it's possible to see how they're using the tool. It's like forums just bring life to the surface even if you fight to stop it, it's a genuinely compelling form of social interaction.

Aside from the spam.

The thanks that comes along is infrequent but very nice to receive.

>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.

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?

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.

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.

I know I've said some really harsh / mean things to people on football forums in the past. It was stuff that, to me, was clearly hyperbole and jesting between fans of opposing teams, but if somebody dug that stuff up and said "Look at what this guy said", I'm pretty sure it would have an impact.

Luckily, the one time I ran for public office, nobody was arsed to go looking. Or I got lucky and they didn't find that stuff and realize it was me.

As parent said:

> 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.

Use pseudonyms! Be cautious about what you post online. There are so few sites that require your real identity that letting it 'slip' should not even be a possibility.

There is no 'my online history', but 'nick1 online history', 'nick2 online history' etc.

>Use pseudonyms! Be cautious about what you post online. There are so few sites that require your real identity that letting it 'slip' should not even be a possibility.

It's not like I'm doing that today at 30 years old. But when you're 15, the internet is relatively new in the mainstream, and these people are your "friends", maybe you give them your phone number so you can chat, or your address so they can send you something, and then someone else gets ahold of it, and there you go.

Kids don't exactly think rationally and are notoriously bad at foreseeing the eventual impact their current actions have.

I know of at least one very prominent politician who says stupid shit on twitter daily. Just sayin'

Well, Donald Trump is president now. The stupid shit you said might be to your advantage.

I don't think I'd want to be the first one, but politics will likely be very different in 30-60 years when all of the candidates for every party have been on the internet since they were teenagers, posting all sorts of inane junk. Sooner or later, we'll have to get used to the idea that none of these guys and girls are super-human, and they've all done dumb stuff that they've hopefully learned from.

I will say that I've been going to greater effort the last few years to use completely different names on every site I post on, and not post anything that could be traced back to my real identity in most places. Not so much here though.

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.

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.

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

My favorite "old development" story is the one about how the developers snuck into Apple to make Graphing Calculator, which is one of my favorite applications of all time.

(For those who may not be familiar: https://www.pacifict.com/Story/)

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

hard to say. Salary was market rate. Stock was 2001-era amzn, which wasn't a bad deal

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.

I'd say given inflation, cost of living etc, that pay back in the day was on average, over average for upper figure salaries. There are more devs/techies/IT literate people about these days so although there are sought after roles, positions are easier to fill these days. IMHO, Obvs.

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...

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.

Are you suggesting that if the boards were written in PHP they'd still be alive or that they'd have been shut down long ago?

That they'd still be alive. Mainly because maintenance, and equally important, new features, would be easier.

The poor reputation of PHP is from bad PHP by bad programmers, use a good programmer (as he seems to be) and the "boost" you get from using PHP would lead to much easier to maintain code.

i.e. the same boost that lets a bad programmer get something running in PHP can take a good programmer and make him even better.

Perl is a powerful language, but it's not well suited for making web pages.

I wouldn't claim to be a good programmer, but I would point out that back then my exposure to PHP was PHP version 3, and version 4 was only just getting established.

Don't sell yourself short.

It's easy to see in hindsight that mod_perl was a mistake, but back then it was hardly obvious - in fact it seemed like mod_perl was poised to take over.

Personally I only switched to PHP around 2003/2004 when I realized it was more productive than perl, so I'm not faulting you at all.

I would have chosen the exact same language as you in 2001. Or maybe ColdFusion if it was a windows shop.

PS. Sorry for coming across as critical, I didn't mean it that way. I was talking only in a retrospective kind of view.

Personally I don't think mod_perl was the issue. It was the lack of a decent lightweight framework for web apps. They did appear eventually (Dancer, Mojolicious), but too late once they were mature enough.

I'm sorry, but this is nonsense. About the same time as the article's author (1999-2002), we wrote a huge discussion site all in Perl, and it was pretty elegant. All the code was compiled with strict, all warnings fixed. The code was properly modular. We even post-processed the code with a linter (similar to pylint).

And did you forget about slash? It still exists and is maintained. Even PHP itself was originally written in mod_perl.

I didn't say you can't write good stuff in mod_perl, but rather it's slower and harder. Using perl as a template language is simply using the wrong tool for the job, that's all.

And I say this having done both.

Think about the site you wrote: Did you have to spend a lot of energy and time writing modules to make handling HTML easier? Did you write functions to deal with form input?

Was the site successful because you essentially wrote an HTML handling framework?

Your argument is that PHP is better than Perl for web development because PHP is a better suited for use directly as a templating language? That may be true, but I don't think it's particularly relevant given the long existence of templating engines for both. The PHP developers I know don't use PHP as their templating language anymore. They use Twig, Smarty, Blade, etc...

I have been in an environment, where there is some legacy Perl scripts that run, everyone is terrified to update it even tho it's a PHP shop. I looked at the code thinking it would be a nightmare, but no. It's actually good clean code. So it's not nonsense, some folks absolutely refuse to engage in new adventures. They would be ready to hack all over it if it was node, but Perl? won't touch with a 10 feet pole.

I don't think the reason of shutdown is anything technical. They're not shutting it down because of perl and they wouldn't be keeping it alive because of PHP.

Ever heard of HTML::Mason? See my other comment on this thread. Considering that embedding HTML in PHP has been frowned upon for over 15 years I can't see how PHP as used in, say, Laravel is any different from Perl/Mojolicious or Ruby on Rails. Around the time the author built the IMDb boards, if I remember, Smarty was preferred over embedding PHP a la Rasmus Lerdorf at which point PHP lost its "made for the web" advantage.

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!

yeah, i'm British, and I kind of mean 'cool kids' to be a slightly self-deprecating ironic phrase. I meant that all the people I knew that were doing more interesting things seemed to be doing perl, so I followed that path. Filter bubbles were still a thing, even with less online communities

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).

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.

Yes it was a stroke of genius for php to add user comments to the bottom of the page describing each function/method etc. the examples in those comments were often much better than the documentation itself. I remember in early 2000s trying to persuade someone at CPAN to add comments to the bottom of CPAN, but they didn't get that they actually had to be on the page at the bottom for anyone to read them.

In the late 90's the cool kids where using python. I was on the Perl bandwagon and in 1999 I bought "Learning Python" and never wrote a line of Perl again.

Let's not forget HTML::Mason which was Perl's answer to PHP but with the overhead of mod_perl. I thought it was at least as good of what PHP had to offer back then. The only argument for PHP vs. Mason was ease of deployment as Mason was arguably more feature-rich.

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

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.

but who will pay for the bandwidth?

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 ?

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.

Why can't there be some project that can take static export of sites and serve them via torrent or IPFS https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs like system. Users who care about this stuff could then pool their bandwidth and storage to keep these things alive, if only in a static form for historical preservation.

all the ads!

would IMDB's ToS be OK with this?

For archival purposes there already are people working on it. The bigger issue is that there's no flow of new people from IMDb title pages. I can set up my own boards for every movie in IMDb but very few people will find them. It's the sheer scale of IMDb user base that made these boards so useful. With so many total users, even very obscure old movies had a good number of people discussing it.

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.

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

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

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!

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!

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).

Fascinating and well written. Thank-you.

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