@Harry Skywalker said:

I've already said this before and I'll say it again:

• the Message Boards in this site should be signed in a much more specific way.

In fact, instead of putting "Discussions" the staff should put MESSAGE BOARDS and in a much more noticeable place.

I think this would help to gain even more movement on the message boards. Many people might don't even know there's message boards in this site.

I came here specifically because I was looking for film and TV show discussions when the-site-I-refuse-to-name-anymore boards closed. While I found it counter-intuitive at first...likely because of preconditioning elsewhere...I have come to love TMDB.

I do wish discussions were more active, but hope it will continue to grow over time. As far as renaming "Discussions" while I can see your point one of the things I like about the current naming convention is the word encourages some level of civility. For that reason, I like the nomenclature.

@Bunny Sprite said:

Yes, I was going to mention the same. It's rather cumbersome to find things on this site. It'd be better to further break up things, so there can be more specific sections/forums/threads, etc.

A lot of times I was looking for something and simply gave up because it seemed like it wasn't there. Too often there's too much "drilling down" into further parts of the site in order to access others.

I agree with this thought that site navigation, while often aesthetically pleasing, isn't always intuitive. I still find myself ending up places I didn't mean to go (like popping back out to a film's main page instead of back to the root discussions page). And it can be especially complex when one is trying to add content, whether for films, TV series or actors/crew. Of course I kinda feel like that is next-level contribution, so I usually expect it to be a bit more cumbersome. For me the general discussion boards work pretty well.

This site keeps growing in popularity and movement.

A great natural thing, that is inevitable, is that as the thousands of TMDb message boards gradually fill with threads, and there's ever-increasingly a solid substantial bounty of discussions for new arrivals to find and engage in, that creates automatic drawing power. During the last 12-1/2 months we all did a heck of a lot of message boards posting, working "from scratch", and definitely got a tremendous, quite impressive, number of individual title/name boards going. Of course there remain a massive number more that have yet to get a word of posting on them. But now things don't seem too bad, regarding that.

With each new month and year there will be steadily many more new threads created, thus to be found. By next February's conclusion of our second full year on TMDb, perhaps double (or more?) the number of threads that so far exist will exist. Many more titles/names will have some posting. The overall body of threads will give newly arriving members many great "diving in" points to feel interested in and engaged by.

I think that, during the first several months of 2017, it turned off a large number of initially-here former IMDbers, who arrived to the site wanting things to be like always before, but not interested in personally making the effort or taking the time (or perhaps truly not having the time) to "do the work" (that is each person create dozens, perhaps hundreds, of good starter threads). Those of us who have stuck around, and of course many others who were here for a while at the beginning, actively posting, but who eventually left for whatever reason(s), have built an excellent body of threads, with good posting in them, that create, in their own right, that much more of a "destination" here, particularly for any specific genre or era, etc. that we individually each have most personal interest in, thus that we've most actively "represented".

Others, who newly arrive, and are interested in the same, or similar, things, will like what they see and will choose to stay - perhaps also will give good word of mouth to their friends who they know are interested in the same type things. We've established (and continue to do so) a solid posting foundation on the TMDb message boards, that now feels so much easier to build upon.

According to Alexa TMDB just keeps exponentially growing over months. The movement right now is way higher than what we had in the beginning after IMDb's message boards closure.

I just think that TMDB should implement some ideas from IMDB itself and former IMDB members to grow even more.

We've got a terrific site, and a whole lot of members (though I believe the majority of them here for API, etc. - whatever people came to the site for throughout the years prior to Feb. 2017), just need many more new members who join the site expressly to become active participants of our message boards community.

Something important I've just discovered: Why is it that if Googling the words "movie message boards", a particular competing site, that didn't open till the closing of the IMDb boards, pops up at tiptop of the list, yet TMDb doesn't even appear on the same first page of results? (In fact, I checked the first several pages of "movie message boards" Google search results, and it's not till on page 7 that finally a dedicated listing for TMDb appears.) This issue seems to be directly due to how the sites present their mission statement / promotional wording. Type in "movie message boards", to see the results that come up, and you'll readily see what I'm referring to. Notice how a particular competing site presents its blurb? That seems to be what is stacking the deck in its favour, people going there first to check things out (and maybe opting to stay), if someone's searching for a movie site that has message boards.

Can Travis word a text to likewise enable TMDb to come up immediately readily, obviously, and prominently in search results for anyone typing in "movie message boards"? Might it be further advantageous to additionally throw in the words "discussion boards" in order to help TMDb show up in search results (for people who might type in that alternate choice of wording)? As things are now, TMDb comes up readily and prominently if you type in "movie database", but not if you do a search for movie message boards.

I do think it's specifically the following TMDb page that's the issue, as it currently doesn't include the words "message boards" and "discussion boards" at all. As things are presented there now, the presentation tells of the many excellent TMDb features - but there's not even an iota of a hint that TMDb even has message/discussion boards:

https://www.themoviedb.org/about

The other site has better search engine optimization (SEO). Maybe Travis is so busy w/other operational and content issues that he hasn't got to it yet. Part of what I do as a consultant is SEO, and from an examination of TMDb's source code it does appear that they still have some work to do.

I also see that this site still has no Wikipedia page. (A Wikipedia search of this site's full name turns up a list of many others w/similar names.)

I recall Travis mentioning, several months back, that due to a misunderstanding with Wikipedia back when TMDb was a new site, he's (thus TMDb) kinda blacklisted there, regarding an article being permitted.

Wikipedia thinks that TMDb is a spam site.

Can somebody please explain to me what the hell are those APIs? It seems many complain TMDB is just a site for "APIs" or something like that.

I never fully understood what's that.

In computer terms, think of it almost like a kind of universal translator. It allows for different kinds of software to work with others. It serves as a kind of bridge.

From Wikipedia: "The API describes and prescribes the expected behavior (a specification) while the library is an actual implementation of this set of rules. A single API can have multiple implementations (or none, being abstract) in the form of different libraries that share the same programming interface. The separation of the API from its implementation can allow programs written in one language to use a library written in another. For example, because Scala and Java compile to compatible bytecode, Scala developers can take advantage of any Java API"

Application programming interface

But what has that got to do with TMDB? Why is TMDB "selling APIs" or something like that?

The API (Application Programming Interface) is a way for people to use the TMDb database to pull information for their own use. For example, if you want to find SF films released in the 1990s you could do it with a couple of lines of code. I thought it was free for "private" use, but possibly not for commercial. A common use is for "Media Managers" like Plex or Kodi to populate their data from a source like TMDb.