Moviepooper Frequently-Asked Questions
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1. Who’s behind all this mess?
   

   Curt Wiederhoeft joined a Usenet cascade of movie spoilers in June of 1995. Doug Whitehead posted this compiled list on his personal site for almost five years, until the publication of a computer industry article by Andy Ihnatko made us realize that there might just be other folks out there clamoring for a resource like this.In January of 2006 Curt turned over the reigns of Moviepooper to Dan Kaiser, creator of TheMovieSpoiler.com

2. Why does this site exist?
   

   The Moviepooper “Mission Statement” is out on our Front Page, but if you’ve read that and still want to know why we cared enough to build a Web site, well, both Doug and Curt are movie junkies, both remember way too much trivia, and both had some time on their hands back in 1999 when the “dot-com craze” was too strong to resist.

3. Moviepooper? Why such a goofy name?
   

   Hey, when a respected professional journalist like Andy Ihnatko makes a brilliant suggestion to a pair of low-imagination rocket scientists, they know when to run with it!

4. You think that’s clever? It’s not “brilliant” to imitate moviepoopshoot.com.
   

   Check the registrar/whois dates. We were around for two years before Kevin Smith made up moviepoopshoot for “Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back.” He copied us, sort of. His site was created as a parody of Ain’t it Cool News (.com), and was originally not a legitimate information outlet, like it is now.

5. Why just endings? Why not tell us everything, and give a summary of the whole plot?
   

   We get this request all of the time, and we always refer folks to The Movie Spoiler. In another case of “great minds think alike,” Dan started up his site practically simultaneously with us, and we’re going to stay off of his turf.

6. Could you at least add reviews, so that even after i’ve read the ending, I can decide whether to see a movie or not?
   

   Moviepooper tries to avoid critical discussion, and provide only objective information. That’s why we’ve recommended our favorite reviewers on the links page. However, you will find a couple of films here that we think are so horrible that it doesn’t take much reading between the lines to tell that our pooper also contains a warning against viewing them.

7. Where do you get all these “poopers?”
   

   Well, the staff (Doug and Curt) see a lot of movies, but we also rely on reader contributions. If you’re sitting on a good spoiler, and you haven’t seen it on the site, please by all means send it in.

8. How frequently does new content appear on the site?
   

   I try to upload a new batch on the Weekends, Fri-Sun. I do have a real job that keeps me pretty busy during the week.

9. I sent you a spoiler, but you haven’t posted it yet! What’s up with that?
   

   Every incoming spoiler gets sorted into one of four boxes: “Extremely good,” “Very good,” “good” or “So-so.” As you can guess, we work at emptying them in quality order. If you’ve sent in a spoiler for a romantic comedy or a superhero movie, chances are that it’ll go into the “so-so” box, and might not make it to the site for years. If it’s a classic, it’ll probably go up within a couple of weeks. New releases and responses to ‘help wanted’ items also get top priority. Sometimes, we sacrifice new film uploads to do needed “repairs” or corrections to existing files. We also occasionally work on crediting some of the hundreds of older reader contributions (which takes a lot of digging), or update our affiliate links in an attempt to bring in enough cash to pay for hosting (your clicks on the Amazon links are what keep us running!)

10. Why do you keep sending me e-mail messages with big attachments?
    

    That’s not us. Both you and Moviepooper are the victims of a third computer: one that is infected with the Klez Worm or one of its decendants. This worm, like the “Melissa” virus, distributes itself to people in an infected Windows machine’s saved address list, but it also spoofs the Return address from Outlook and the Internet Explorer cache. So, the reality is that you got the offending message from someone whom you know, and who also happens to read Moviepooper. All of our e-mail originates from a Mac OS computer, so we are not capable of distributing this worm. Moviepooper will never send you an e-mail attachment without getting your prior permission, so please delete all such messages unread (or risk becoming infected with Klez yourself). Believe us, we feel your pain. We get about 1-2 Klez messages every day.

11. While we’re on the subject of e-mail, what exactly is your privacy policy?
    

    Moviepooper.com will never disclose (sell, give, trade, barter, etc.) your e-mail address to any advertising entity. We have in the past shared e-mail addresses among private individuals who read the site (when somebody has a question about a movie ending submitted by a third party), but we always obtain the permission of all of the people involved before doing so.

12. Just to beat the e-mail dead horse, will you send me a message when you update your site?
    

    Better than that, we have an RDF Site Summary (RSS) channel for the site (and if you want to know what RDF stands for, just look it up here. This way, if you run a little program called an RSS aggregator, (freeware for Windows or Mac), you can keep abreast of the latest developments from this and THOUSANDS of other sites. Once your aggregator is running, you simply “subscribe” to the Moviepooper channel, using this icon: , or manual entry of the URI: http://www.moviepooper.com/rss.xml

13. It’s really annoying that your site always opens external links in a new window. Haven’t you ever heard of the “_top” tag? Why do you insist on doing it that way?
    

    It’s just in case you still had some reading to do here. Several of the browsers (which we’ll leave nameless), will choke on a frames-based page when you hit the “Back” button. This way, we protect ourselves from badly-coded browsers. If you truly find it anoying, we recommend that you go out and download Mozilla. After you install it, go to the “Preferences” menu, and under Navigator, click on ‘Tabbed browsing.’ This will allow you to open new links in the same window, but just under a new “Tab,” simply by clicking on your middle mouse button. You can also have Mozilla open those tabs in the background, so if you like, you can keep on reading where you are, and then visit the linked page when you’re done. Very handy! also, Mozilla will easily let you block the pop-under ads that we occasionally have to use to pay the bills around here.

14. How can I get my site listed on your “links” page?
    

    We only link to sites that we have found to be consistently informative and entertaining. If you do not see your favorite site listed, please send us the URL, and we’ll check it out. If we find ourselves going back again and again, we’ll add it. Moviepooper does not participate in any kind of “link exchange” (which probably hurts us on Google, but it seems more honest), and we will not link to a promotional site for any single film (sorry, that includes you indies) on that particular page.