Cinema Treasures

  • November 21, 2006

    Update on site performance

    As many of you know, we’ve had to temporarily disable our search tool due to the high volume of traffic that Cinema Treasures is receiving.

    We’re making good progress improving overall performance on the site. Theater pages and news pages are now loading near instantaneously, thanks to the caching support we’ve added. We’ve also made a number of optimizations to the site that will help improve performance.

    As a side effect of this, we’ve limited the “Who’s Online?” feature to just the homepage. While it’s nice to know who’s online, this feature was one of the things really slowing down the site. So that means going forward, “who’s online” really means “who’s online on the homepage”. Practically speaking, it might seem like less people are online, but the true number will be much higher.

    So when will search return? The answer is… as soon as search doesn’t make the rest of the website so slow it’s unusable. Our goal is to fix this issue by the end of the year, but we’re making very good progress and may be able to restore this feature soon.

    As always, thanks for your patience and continued support. And have a nice Thanksgiving!

  • November 17, 2006

    New feature: Commentaries

    Today, we’re bringing you what we’re hoping will become a regular feature here on Cinema Treasures… commentaries about the theater going experience from a variety of perspectives.

    The first commentary is from our blog editor, Michael Zoldessy, who came up with this idea. But we’re hoping that many of you, our users, will be inspired to submit your own commentaries.

  • October 31, 2006

    Happy Halloween!

    The Chicago Theatre, as photographed by laffy4k. (via Flickr)

  • October 20, 2006

    Cinema Treasures seeks community volunteer

    We’re looking for a volunteer who can help manage us our growing user community.

    With over 100,000 comments, it’s become quite a challenge for our current staff to stay on top of over 15,000 individual comment threads.

    The volunteer position would include these duties:
    – Help us keep theater comment threads on-topic
    – Monitor recent comments for copyrighted material, flames, etc.
    – Warn (and possibly ban) users who can’t behave

    And the ideal candidate should have these qualities:
    – A passion for movie theaters
    – Easy-going personality with great social skills
    – Previous background running a large message board
    – A knack for dispute resolution

    If this sounds like you, drop us a line.

  • October 19, 2006

    New Cinema Treasures volunteer

    We’d like to belatedly welcome our newest volunteer to Cinema Treasures… Michael Zoldessy!

    As many of you probably noticed, Michael has been helping us out with our blog, and we’re proud to say he’s now our official Blog Editor.

    To read a little more about Michael (as well as our long-time theater editor Bryan Krefft), check out our updated Volunteer page.

    Also… thanks to everyone who’s expressed interest in being a volunteer. We plan to add more volunteers in the near future, so look out for future announcements.

  • September 21, 2006

    Reminder: Don’t repost copyrighted content!

    This morning, we received an email from a newspaper asking us to remove several theater comments where someone posted the full text of newspaper articles.

    While it may seem that it’s ok to post an entire newspaper article, it actually isn’t… so please remember to follow the guidelines below when making a comment (or submitting news) that includes a newspaper article.

    DO:
    – Include a link to the article on the newspaper’s website
    – Include a short summary about the article, preferably in your own words. (You can also quote up to a paragraph from the original story, but no more than that.)

    DON’T:
    – Repost an entire newspaper article
    – Post content without attribution — always include the source

  • September 1, 2006

    Reminder: Keep comments on topic!

    Lately, we’ve noticed many Cinema Treasures attacking each other. There are several theater pages where spirited debates about preservation have gotten increasingly personal.

    These off-topic personal attacks clutter up theater comments, making it difficult to find what people are actually looking for — information and discussion about classic movie theaters. (They also prevent the people who created and help run this website from working on more important issues.)

    So, to address this problem, we’d like to remind everyone about our terms of use. If you engage in any of the following actions, we will take appropriate action:

    • Posting off-topic comments that taunt or bait other users

    • Attacking or otherwise slandering fellow users, preservation officials, or theater managers — even if you have a legitimate grievance, this website isn’t the place for it

    • Creating duplicate accounts for the purpose of attacking other Cinema Treasures users

    • Posting comments that are racist, sexist, homophobic, slanderous, and otherwise against our terms of use.

    The first time you violate any of theses rules you will receive a warning. The second time your posting privileges will be suspended for a month. The third time you will be banned from the site.

    Please remember why we are all here — to discover, to preserve, and to protect. In the spirit of community and preservation, please leave the personal attacks out on the playground, so to speak, where they belong.

    Thanks for your help!

    Patrick Crowley & Ross Melnick
    Cinema Treasures

  • June 26, 2006

    Theater pages are back online!

    Apologies to those who were unable to access theater pages recently. Due to a database bug, the theater pages weren’t loading correctly.

  • June 5, 2006

    Submit your poll ideas!

    Hey, everybody!

    We’ve run out of ideas for the Cinema Treasures poll, so the poll is on hiatus until we can think of more questions.

    If you have any fresh ideas, please submit them here. Just to save time, we don’t need any more polls that ask…

    • What is your favorite star/film of all-time?
    • How many movies have you seen this month/summer/year?
    • About anything to do with Star Wars

    Thanks for your help!

  • May 26, 2006

    Update your email address

    Greetings, Cinema Treasures fans!

    Minor request: if you haven’t updated your email address in a while, can you please do so? We’ve been getting a lot of returned email from comment notifications, so I’d like to make sure we have the correct address for everyone.

    Editing your email address is easy. Just login to your Cinema Treasures account, then click on the Profile page link at the top of your screen. Once there, enter the new email address and click ‘Update Profile’. That’s it!

    Thanks,
    Patrick

    PS: Worried about privacy? We will never send you spam or sell your email address.