Website Name: MoviePropForum.com
Website URL: http://www.moviepropforum.com/
Website Description: None
Website Owner/Admin: Mark Crawley
Type of Website: Online Discussion Forum
Subject Matter/Focus: Original Props and Wardrobe & Replica Props and Wardrobe
Cost: None
Access/Membership/Participation Requirements: Open registration. Viewable to non-members. Must register to post.
Participant Overview: 10,574 members as of the time of this review.
Content/Functionality: Forum consists of Community forums, Screen Used Prop and Costume Collecting forums, Replica Prop and Costume Collecting forums, Marketplace forums, and Movie and TV Show Discussions forums. Also has a Private Message and E-mail system.
Presentation/Quality: MoviePropForum.com runs the popular Invision Power Board (version 2.0.3, latest version 2.2.2). The layout is busy and there is little moderation. It features banner ads and annoying pop-up ads.
Time in Service: Operating since December 2004.
Updates/Activity: Not much consistent activity outside of spam posts and ads.
My Experience & Personal Review:
“Reviewing” this website is challenging without some back story…
Back in December 2004, on the original, authentic “Movie Prop Forum” (hereafter referred to as the (Original) Movie Prop Forum), reviewed HERE, a member of that forum, Mark Crawley, who owned the domain name movieprop.com approached Mike, informing him that he had registered the domain moviepropforum.com and launched a competing “Movie Prop Forum”. Of course, that was the name of Mike’s forum, only he never did register that domain. Obviously, there was concern that there could be some confusion with two forums having the same name.
Long story short, Mark continued on with his own “Movie Prop Forum” (hereafter referred to as the (Other) Movie Prop Forum), using the same software (Invision) and same name (The Movie Prop Forum).
So the (Original) Movie Prop Forum continued on as well, with it’s default Invision-hosted URL (mpdf.ipbhost.com), while Mark managed his own, with the www.MoviePropForum.com domain.
To this day, people are still confused, and it is unfortunate. You can read about this in more detail on the (Original) Movie Prop Forum here: Regarding the Confusion Over the Other MPF
In any event, on with the review…
In short, the (Other) Movie Prop Forum does not seem to have ever gotten started. Months can pass without a single authentic post. Most activity seems to consist of robots posting spam, weird off topic remarks, or people asking why the forum exists (or asking if it still exists).
If I had to guess at the purpose of the website, I would speculate that it is to park the domain, allow hits from spam bots (hence the 10,000+ registered members), and to achieve high ranking in Google searches for “movie prop forum” (currently #2).
Regardless, I would not recommend using this site, as there does not seem to be any value in doing so.
Jason De Bord