@9, the download itself contains the instructions in a text file called "Letter from Col Needham". (the uploader is facetiously going by the name of IMDb founder Col Needham). Here's what written in the text file:
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Alright, lads. I'm quitting Amazon since Jeff didn't give me the yachts he promised me for closing the IMDb message boards.
Now that IMDb is dead, I'm releasing a website dump for the IMDb message boards to the public for your offline perusal. This includes all discussion threads for all titles with at least 100 votes listed on IMDb, including movies, TV shows, videos and even games. All upcoming titles in 2017 are also included. Of those that didn't make the cut, almost none had anyone discussing it except the few ones titled "where can I find this?" So for all intents and purposes, this is a complete dump of the per-title boards. In total, this database contains 1,914,799 discussion threads for 86,581 titles. What it doesn't contain are the general boards and the celebrity boards. I'm afraid you have to find them elsewhere.
The threads are preserved in their original format, including stylesheets, emoji's, and signatures that are indistinguishable from the posts themselves, in all their early-2000s glory, minus the ads and brandings.
A Python script is provided to extract the discussion board for a title so you can read it in a browser. You can run it on all major operating systems. To use the script, first install the newest version of Python 2 (NOT Python 3) from https://www.python.org. Then, open a command window in the directory this database resides in (On Windows, Shift+Click in the directory to find this option) and run:
vintagedb-extract.py IMDbTitleID
where IMDBTitleID looks like ttXXXXXXX, which you can find on the URL of the title's page on imdb.com. For example, the ID of Carmencita (1894) is tt0000001.
If you remember the name but not the ID of a title, you can also search for it:
vintagedb-extract.py "game of thrones"
The database itself is built on sqlite3. Anyone interested is invited to take the database and do what you like with it. You can find the database schema within the script. Mine some data out of it. Build a website out of it. Maybe even write a better viewer for it. Or simply indulge in reading what online trolls had to say about your favorite movies.
Please seed.
Col Needham
2017-02-17
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