Actually, I emailed them using the consumer complaint form on the web site.

Here’s what happened;

I was a member of the IMDb for at least 5-7 years, actively posting on the message boards. There are No warnings of any type given for improper behavior. The only form of warning any users receive is to have the time delay between when they’re allowed to post successive messages increased. Of course since the staff won’t explain why they do anything, you’re left to guess at the reason the timer got increased. In all my time on the site, I only ever had that time increase once, and that happened after I sent the staff a sarcastic message protesting the full-page animated flash ads that couldn’t be closed (before I started blocking all ads). The increased delay was in place for about 2-3 days, then went back to what it was before. That’s the only warning of any kind that I ever received.

About a year later, I noticed that entire threads containing dozens of valid messages were being deleted by the admins for no apparent reason. When you try asking the staff to explain why a thread was deleted, they give you a BS “It’s policy not to discuss the actions of admins.” In other words, you don’t have the right to know why an admin felt the need to delete a 50+ message thread on the appeal of horror movies. Then I noticed that respected users with long posting histories were getting deleted as well. Of course nobody had any idea why they were deleted, since the staff refuses to tell you anything.

I wasn’t the only one to notice this either. One of the most respected posters in the “I Need to Know” board, who answered probably 75% of the requests to ID film and TV show titles, closed his account in protest over the heavy-handed tactics being used by the admins.

I looked in the help board and saw multiple posts from users wanting to know why their posts were deleted, even though they didn’t violate the terms of service in any way. The answer by the IMDb drones was always to contact the staff. That was useless advice as the staff won’t tell you why a post was deleted. I replied to 2-3 of these messages in a somewhat snarky way (toward the IMDb, not toward the user) and the next day my account was banned from accessing the message boards.

When I emailed the staff they replied that they had the right to ban “abusive” posters, just like a real-world business will kick out abusive customers. When I asked what I had done that was “abusive”, I got the standard “We don’t discuss the actions of admins.” I was also informed that if they discovered that I had registered under another account, they would also automatically ban that one as well. In other words, I was banned for life from the board and they won’t even tell me what I did wrong. My posts may have been sharply critical of the IMDb, but I can’t see where that violates any of the TOS.

At the time, the TOS stated that “any and all disputes arising from your use of IMDb.com” would be handled by arbitration. Note that it doesn’t mention anything about arbitration only applying to paid members. I wrote a very civil letter explaining the situation and formally requesting arbitration of what I felt was unfair treatment. I never received any reply. I then contacted Amazon to explain the situation. Amazon informed me that they have absolutely nothing to do with how the IMDb is run.

So, I finally filed a consumer complaint with the Seattle AG’s office. After a period of a couple months, they told me that the IMDb hadn’t responded to either letters or phone calls and that there was nothing else they could do.

I know most people consider this going overboard over a web site, but it really pisses me off that the admins running it are allowed to just ignore the posted terms of service and ban people on a whim. Why do they even have terms of service if they’re just going to ignore them? Show me where it states that making snarky comments about how the site is run will result in your being banned for life. In fact, can you show me any other web site with a forum that will ban a user for life with no warning and no explanation of what they’ve done wrong?

Plenty of other users on the boards posted genuinely abusive messages toward other users, posted spam, etc. None of them get banned. I post 2-3 messages criticizing the IMDb policies and I get banned? Yeah, it pissed me off!