Welcome to Naberrie Fields! Introductions & banter

I moved it.

What are the chances an employee at Lucasfilm has ever visited this site?

Ahmed is most welcome here. Can't think of another fan site more appropriate for the man who played Jar Jar Binks.

Right-on!!!



It's a little janky. But I've seen worse.

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Quote tags on fire and failing after six quotes (the old TFN message boards). I watched posts disappear and whole threads evaporate into nothingness (the old IMDb message boards). All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain (or peeing on Kamino).

By "they", I assume you mean some people enamoured of the old IMDb message boards, not the people at IMDb itself. There are several knockoff versions around, but it's really not the same anymore.

Cleaner? Well, I dunno. What I would prefer is if the spacing between the threads were to be reduced a little bit. I quite like our colour scheme and general aesthetic, however. There's always room for improvement, of course. 

It was a very challenging place to post to. I have previously referred to it as a cesspit and a den of vipers. 

However, there were one or two better posters, even on the Star Wars boards. One of them even joined here, but I never noticed; and by the time you and I began posting, they had long disappeared (I attempted to contact them nonetheless).

The bizarre thing is: Even IMDb wasn't unmoderated. It was basically a chaotic free-for-all, but your posts could still get censored, sometimes for pathetic reasons. On a couple of occasions, I called out the bullshit, heinously lax moderation, and those posts were deleted (not by me). Another time, someone made a hail of troll attacks on me, and when I defended myself (though it would have been better to not engage them at all), my posts were uprooted, not his.

Discussions -- or the often rancorous exchanges that passed for discussion -- were always on the edge of annihilation, too. Unlike any other message board I've posted to, all threads and posts were automatically pruned after existing so long without fresh activity. This varied board to board. On quiet boards, posts might stick around for years. On busier ones, maybe only a few months.

The whole thing, in many ways, was the very definition of a bad joke. But for all the pointlessness of it and my antipathy toward it, I have some nostalgia for the place. I spent a fair amount of time on the Star Wars prequel boards, and also the board for Sofia Coppola's "Lost In Translation". Both were subject to endless hater comments and entire accounts just seemed to be set up for trolling actual fans on those particular boards (and, I'm sure, on many others). I saw an opening to mount an impassioned defence, on and off, for seven or eight years (I think most of my posting occurred between 2006 and 2014). The last-minute announcement that the boards were being closed forever, and all the content erased, was the final insult. I think they gave everyone around three weeks to save whatever they wanted and then it was all gone. This was 2017. I had already ditched it by then. But that was also the year that I was banned from TFN. The Internet, in my opinion, began to turn much more censorious around then. There was truly something in the air.

The Prequel Trilogy was the only Star Wars trilogy begun and ended while IMDb existed. The Original Trilogy was already an iconic set of movies and part of cinematic history, while the Sequel Trilogy was only just starting up (with the release of TFA having happened only about fifteen months before the IMDb message boards were scrapped). Funny, really. Disney basically evaded all criticism -- for all I know, it may have even had something to do with the closure of the boards, given the fact it owns half the entertainment industry and may have leaned on IMDb to silence the "little people" from speaking out. I'd love to know exactly what happened. Maybe there'll be a big e-mail server leak one day or something. But yeah: Poor George got it in the neck because fanboys had free run of the Internet back then and got to rant and rave without limit. I've used this quotation many times before, but I think it's really apt when one thinks of the detritus posting to IMDb: "When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." (Jonathan Swift)

I have some of your IMDb (and TFN) posts archived, if you're interested. Those Star Wars Episode "Appreciation" threads you made on IMDb were a thing of beauty. 

But yeah, I know what you mean. It's all rather fleeting. Impermanence defines the Internet as much as consistency and concreteness. Bizarre, really -- you might think it would all be archived and stick around forever.

Oh, and let me just correct myself:


I was referring to a different person above, but IMDb is also how I met Ingram (if he even remembers). I encouraged him to join the fun at TFN, and then, eventually, Naberrie Fields. See? IMDb was totally worth it sometimes.

LOL! I'm kinda the same way. And will do.