It was a sad Monday today 29 September, 2008. A beloved website designed to keep track of DVD collections was given the old heave-ho by the corporate weasels that had bought it about a year or so ago. I am talking about one of the best, if not the best, DVD collection tracking websites. DVDSpot.com was an excellent resource of DVDs that are available world-wide. Each entry for a particular title had just about any and all information you would want to have for a DVD release (so long as it was a legitimate release, no bootlegs or pirated copies were allowed). I have yet to find a compatible collection website for other hobbies, or even for DVDs. There are a few that come close, but I really loved the feel of The DVDSpot.
Well during the day on Monday 29 September, the following message was posted on the main home page of my beloved DVD tracking website from the current corporate owners of the site CNET.com. Red text on a bright yellow background.
"On Wednesday October 15th DVDSpot will be closed permanently. This decision was made to allow us to focus on other great web properties. We sincerely appreciate everyone's contribution to the DVDSpot community and hope you enjoyed the free services it provided. We understand many people will not want to lose their personal collection data, so we remind you that you can export that data to file by going to Membership Tools while logged in and clicking the Export to File button. This will create a file with all movies in your Owned and Watched lists. Also keep in mind the editor system for approving DVD additions and edits has been disabled, so no new or edited DVDs will be added."
To say that this angered many of the regular users would be an understatement. The site also has a forum board, that I visit and participate in on a daily (when I can) basis. It has many people who share a common interest, the collection and watching of movies and TV shows on DVD.
Similar sites and forum boards have come and gone. One that stood out was called Guzzlefish.com (a petstore website occupies that domain name now), even though it had a neometal/punk type feel to it, the GF site was a useful site. Unfortunately I didn't take full advantage of it when it was around. It had categories for music and the VHS format in addition to DVDs. I took a break from it for a year or so, returned (never completely filled out my music collection or videos) and then 6 months to a year or so later it was gone. For a while there was a forum board website called Guzzlefish Forums Refugee which was an attempt to give former members a nostalgic feel on a different site. Well the traffic on that site died down and so did the site. Now the url to that site, which was somebodies personal ID name from the old GuzzleFish site, is some sort of personal website of some guy (I guess the same guy) and his hobbies which I think include hunting and para-military groups or something. DVDSpot.com has followed in the website death march.
Good news is that some of the die hard moderators who helped on the DVDSpot have started a new Refugee Forum for DVDSpot members at bulletpointreview.com. Many of the regular DVDSpot folks had been old GuzzleFish folks so a lot of them have tried all sorts of sites. Most agree that The Spot was the best. Others have said that DVDProfiler is better, well it does have the offline aspect to it, in addition to the online database. There is also DVDAFicianado.com (DVDAF.com) which not as many like, mostly because it is slow to get updates, hard to make additions (or wait for approval to make the additions) and it looks awful. A semi-recent update made it even more unbareable to use.
Well I guess it's back to the slide rule, colored construction paper and paste.
No comments:
Post a Comment