New RateBeer Investment

This site allows place ratings: https://beermapping.com

Still would be nice to find one site that allows both beer and place reviews

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X1000, yeah.

downloading data from Ratebeer is the first step. what about uploading that data to other sites? is there an automated way to do this? I’d pay good $$ for that

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Another option is reading the HTML pages, parse them and retrieve the rating information from there. But that’s a tough one. I would do that for a bottle of Toppling Goliath Brunch Brand Stout :grin:

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What if we stay and change InBev from within?

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Sues the site for what? You own your ratings.

Remember that if one does choose to scrape Ratebeer data at this point, they’ll be responding to ABInBev’s legal team. If your plan is to scrape the entire database of beers (which, honestly, would be trivially done in an afternoon, even without API access—the entire database is incrementally coded directly into the URL!!!), prepare to get a threatening letter in the mail soon after.

Is scraping different than each user taking their ratings elsewhere?

Looks like you are right, here:

“For clarity, the foregoing license grants to us and our users does not affect your other ownership or license rights in your User Content, including the right to grant additional licenses to your User Content, unless otherwise agreed in writing.”

The scraping was in regards to actually building out a new database of beers. Pulling personal ratings is fine, but a new site needs a new database, and Ratebeer’s terms do not allow you to pull Ratebeer’s data for any purposes but to serve Ratebeer.

"Subject to these Terms of Service, we grant each user of the Services a worldwide, non-exclusive, non-sublicensable and non-transferable license to use (i.e., to download and display locally) Content solely for purposes of using the Services. Use, reproduction, modification, distribution or storage of any Content for other than purposes of using the Services is expressly prohibited without prior written permission from us. You shall not sell, license, rent, or otherwise use or exploit any Content for commercial use or in any way that violates any third party right. "

Reading their database through HTTP protocol is completely nuts. I don’t believe that’s feasible. The only feasible thing that I can think of is retrieving my own ratings

I thought for a moment you were replying to my post about having built a Lotus Approach database Alex!

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Last time I saw Lotus was the email system at Andersen Consulting in '98…

I wouldn’t copy the ratings of unwilling people.

In a simplified form:

  1. from BeerID 1 to 700,000, get the name, ABV and Style, no picture or description; that information doesn’t “belong” to RB; build a new DB with those 700,000 beers
  2. (I’ll keep this for me now)
  3. build the script to be used by any user who wants it to scrap his own ratings and upload to the new website, as he would do manually if he had time; the user uses the script
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We had WordPerfect plus Lotus 1-2-3 etc for everything else at work long before MSOffice. I’m not even sure MSOffice was even around at all back then. Even when it did arrive, I’m not sure it had Access - or at least the version we had at work. And then it took a good while before I could blag a copy from work to use at home. And I sure as hell wasn’t going to shell out to actually buy a copy for home use.

I did so with the first investment.

We´ll miss you, chriso!

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yeah it’s a few lines of code. grab the URL which includes a simple string and unique ID, use a library to parse the html and search for entry attributes to save. It’s very feasible but it’s a bad idea for a lot of reasons.

Google Maps/Places is an excellent place to enter your Brewery, Bar, Taproom, Restaurant, and Bottle Shop reviews. More often than anywhere else your reviews will be read by folks involved in the business, and many times you will get a reply from the owners or managers.

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Lol. I used to be there. Pretty dead socially.

This is a very interesting and useful tip. I do not know why, but never thought of it before