This is overdue, but I am posting about it, anyways. Months ago, Rotten Tomatoes decided, just like IMDB.com did, to kill off their message boards. However unlike IMDB, RT decided not to warn the users, and closed the boards for good, making it impossible for users to recover anything they wanted to save. I keep forgetting to make backups of certain things I want to save or preserve, and every time I regret doing so. This is not why I am angry, though-no, I am upset that after years of giving the site eyeball traffic along with others, RT decided to can a feature that is responsible for them existing in the first place. Too bad, since I think the forums were experiencing sort of a resurgence, and people still posted there, although I will admit things were never the same after 2011 or 2012, I guess. Maybe it was time. I have been a member of numerous sites, and I always departed before they went under, although there were a few that I hung around at long after someone turned off the lights. No apology has been posted, and I feel worse for the user mods, several of whom I am friends with on Facebook. They should have at least received something for their troubles, or some kind of heads up, but the RT higher ups, probably embarrassed by some high profile incidents (thanks insane DC fanboys for making things worse, not better-and yes I blame you, too) that occurred on the site, although those were not related to the actual forums themselves, decided to call it quits. There were some good jokes made in OT that the forums were the dark side of the site, chained up in the basement, hidden from view, which was not wrong considering that RT made it hard to find the forum link around 2008, or 2009.
Goodbye, RT OT. The political and sports talk were always fun, and I have good memories of posting during election time, when things were at their most heated and active. Goodbye, both RT chats, although the OT one was held off site and is still around, while GD’s was at its height when Yahoo hosted it until late 2007, or 2008-I do not recall. I managed to get booted from the OT one a bunch of times, for various reasons or another, heh. The Yahoo one had live cams, which was really cool, and ended up pulling users from different groups. Farewell, GD: Oscar season when Crash won is one of the site’s highlights, a real moment in time. I still have not seen that movie, and I probably never will. All of the neat thread groups departed to different sites, all which I post on, and maybe this is just another downside to the Internet: the fragmenting of people, divided up into sections and groups. There are different streaming services, different social media (Facebook and Twitter have literally killed the message boards, for better, or for worse), multiple entertainment options. A lot of memories, all gone forever, lost in time, quote that overused classic Blade Runner line, or the Children of Men one about the last one left turning out the light, auf wiedersehen even though I will never seen the site again.
I wish I could be really petty, yet I still follow RT on their twitter feed, mostly to lob meaningless “Bring back the forums” posts at them, a David throwing Internet stones at a Goliath that never cared in the first place. 20,000 some posts, well almost 21k, never to be recovered, along with everything else. Perhaps that is for the best, and there have been jokes about how now that RT’s forums are gone (the site still lives, of course, not that I care too much) they can run for office now, although I doubt anyone worried about that sort of thing. Thus ends a journey that began in 2003, and I imagine that my old posts were really awful, so hooray for them no longer existing, although knowing the Internet nothing is ever really gone, a fact that Donald Trump and others keep forgetting. On to the next phase, whatever that is; I myself hope for virtual reality, or space travel. Both would be nice. MadMan_731/MadMan (the site let me drop the numbers later on)/MadMan_7 and TheOmegaMan71 (aliases), signing out, for good.
Down The Rabbit Hole 