Ask The RateBeer Team!

OK title change. :slight_smile: Thanks for the nudge. Cheers!

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I was doing that too and then got busy on other fronts. I’ll be spending time with these items twice weekly now, adding it to my roles. I’ll mostly be grooming feedback for tickets and possibly fixing them myself.

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How do I update my title to “RateBeer Serf”?

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Wow… I almost feel embarrassed by the ‘amazing’ success of this “ask the RateBev Team” action! I presume some have silently gave up and the others are just blind optimists.

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Good question. I’ll start that work Mar 1 to go live before April. -Joe

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  1. New styles before April - Joe
  2. We are looking into this now. RateBeer is not too far from moving into it’s third decade and there are number of features we have on the site now that overlap and some that have converged. We’ll be looking at what we do My Cellar, and a proposed feature of saving to lists, and Favoriting… There’s definitely a lot of similarity and overlap there. -Andrea (Product Owner)
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It’s a tough one to call. Australia hasn’t won the Ashes on English soil since 2001, although they have some star players coming back from ahem a well deserved break. However, England’s recent result against the Windies doesn’t inspire confidence for the locals. It will ultimately come down to where Joe Root bats in the order and the proximity of a Homebase store to the Australian dressing room. It doesn’t bode well that we noticed this in Warner’s Favourite List (https://www.ratebeer.com/beer/rinn-duin-sandpiper/247949/). Our prediction is a 3-2 England series win. -Doug (Global Business Lead)

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From Devs:
We do check the forum for bug reports, but you are correct that we don’t always give feedback on when we are planning to work on this. We will add checking the forum to our daily routine and respond to let you know that we are aware of the issue. -Andrea (Product Owner)
We are currently working on a fix for the milestones. If everything goes to plan, we plan to release a fix for this next week. - Joe
From Director:
From a longer term perspective, RateBeer remains dedicated to growing the craft beer market by connecting beer lovers and helping them discover, share and buy beers from around the globe supported by the most comprehensive ratings and reviews. Our current focus is on making improvements to the underlying infrastructure and user experience, modernisation of key pages and an affiliate marketplace trial we are running with retailers in the UK and Australia aimed at making it easier for beer lovers to find, purchase and enjoy their favourite beers. In addition to this, we are also using feedback from the community and our users all over the globe to prioritise these efforts and make the most of our resources. As new features are released or exciting developments take place, we’ll continue to keep you posted with the most up-to-date information. -Doug (Global Business Lead)
From Joe:
I’ll still be deeply involved in RateBeer’s day to day. My focus is on the whole community which means each one of you. I’ll still be coding, checking in on quality and fixes, and also supporting efforts to modernize with new features, and improve user experience.
Two things (1) yeah of course it feels bad, we’re all people behind the keyboards, but (2) RateBeer’s endured name-calling since our inception, and having a thick skin is part of doing anything successful in the public eye. I feel that generally, people know we’re contributing something unique and positive to beer culture, and even if some outside the community are doubtful, that hasn’t stopped us from growing and continuing to serve our core membership and a broader audience. -Joe

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Thank you for your feedback -splitting regions is a popular request from our users. Right now we’re focused on improvements to the places page, maps and rate and review flow but we’ve got our eye on Australia (and definitely Belgium!) and the site will certainly grow with us which would eventually mean sectioning the regions.

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Is that really the 6-pack you’d choose? Doug would rather have a 6-pack of Dainton Blood Orange New England Rye IPA as a peace offering, Andrea would prefer something from Jopen, Tiffany would take a bottle of anything from Wildflower and Joe’s been hankering for some more La Sirene Saison ever since his last visit to Australia.

Think outside the box - we may create something different, easier to use, rather than fixing the ‘old’ app. We are currently collecting feedback on why offline functionality is important and we’ll work on a plan from there (Exploration: Offline functionality)

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I guess you mean the issues most users are having with the maps feature on several pages. Google made some changes to how maps are used last year, which caused the map display to break on many pages. We’re currently working on the new ‘Places’ page, which will have a working map! Next on the list is solving some of the log-in issues. We should be able to start work on a new city map once the new ‘Places’ page is live. - Andrea (Product Manager)

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We answered all of these questions today as a team - Joe (who you know), Doug (the global business lead), Andrea (product owner, manages the tech team) and Tiffany (marketing manager). Feel free to reach out to any of us with ideas or questions any time!

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This is a great point and we know that there is a lot to improve here. We recently made some small changes (such as adding the brewer location when adding a beer, to avoid choosing the wrong brewer). We also plan to bring the add a beer option to mobile (hopefully by mid year). - Andrea (Product Owner)

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Yes, we are compliant with GDPR. Through GDPR individuals have the right to request and gain access to their personal data and we comply with that. Right now we do not have the functionality for users to download their own ratings.
You can find our privacy policy with those details here:https://www.ratebeer.com/privacy_policy.asp.

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Same as the response to @Bryne’s question – But basically: Google made some changes to how maps are used last year, which caused the map display to break on many pages. We’re currently working on the new ‘Places’ page, which will have a working map. We should be able to start work on a new city map once the new ‘Places’ page is live. - Andrea (Product Manager)

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Chat rooms: We don’t have a plan to bring this back in the near future. We are switching over a lot of things to newer technoligies (such as beer ratings, the places page) and we need to dedicate time to create a great experience on the main RateBeer site. - Andrea (Product Owner)
Rating number stats: I miss that too of course. It’s one of the tradeoffs of having all the new Discourse features. If there were an easy way of adding that, we certainly would, but unfortunately there is not. -Joe
Gatherings: Bringing back RateBeer Best Fest was the number one comment we recieved during this year’s RateBeer Best. Not just from the punters, but from the brewers, too! We would LOVE to do this again, we’re a super small team, so just give us a little time to fix some bugs and get the platform working smoothly - but it’s something we’re definitely talking about. And we’re starting small with some events, and partnering with some established festivals - so just keep an eye out while we grow the marketing and gathering side of things! -Tiffany (Marketing Manager)

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No changes have been made to the safeguards that protect RateBeer’s integrity. An employee would still need to create an account and leave more than 10 75+ character reviews for their rating to count, weighted at the lowest level and wouldn’t change the overall score. As for the conflict of interest - ZX Ventures is commited to RateBeer retaining it’s quality and reputation. The RateBeer team works independently from the wider business, and the reviews are still created by independent users. -Doug (Global Business Lead)

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I see… The best way for us to manage these issues is in the RateBeer Feedback Forum. We will get to these. We have several important bugs in there that are on our radar and we’re either working on now or will be working on soon. -Joe

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I’m late to the party on this one, but are you also looking at the bugs page (not on the forum, the original one) and fixing those issues?
If yes, can you please also close the bugs that you fix?

If no, can we please close that one and instead point users to logging in to the forum for reporting any bugs, or redirecting the bug reports as new posts to forum bug threads?

There are very few admins that have the energy to work through the bugs these days, would appreciate some help here for sure.

I am doing way too many that are not for my area, and am afraid I’ll step on a few too many toes if this keep up.

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