New search function

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22

Took a few steps but,yeah.

23

If I can’t see whether or not I’ve rated a beer in the search results page that would kinda destroy Ratebeer for me. Sometimes when buying beer in a store the website is slow enough for me (either because of smoking servers or just bad reception on my phone) and having to open an extra page to see whether I’ve rated a beer or not would be killing.

Having said all this: @joet please be careful with the changes you and your team are developing and implementing. And please communicate with your loyal and supportive community on what you’re planning to change and how you’re going to do that and maybe even add why. You’ve made a poll proposing a change and people were heavily against that. The fact that you (I doubt it) or probably someone from the InbevMinions (more likely) thought that change would be a good idea sparked some distrust in the vision you/your team have for Ratebeer, at least for me it did.

I know of a few more than average users that are on the edge of leaving Ratebeer and implementing incomplete updates to a live website is a great way to give them more stuff to hate on and to push them over the edge. Communication will be key now. I feel like I need to know what vision you have for this website so I can hang on a bit longer when a new update breaks something or changes things I don’t like. I need to know whether stuff that has in my opinion changed the site for worse is a temporary bug or a lasting feature. Maybe make someone community manager if it’s too much to handle communication like this yourself. But please be open about it.

4 Likes
24

Quoting the most important parts of your post to reiterate them.

It highlights for me what I think is a massive problem on this site right now: communication, or the lack of it, between staff (employees, not admins) and users. This is even more key now that there are additional stakeholders.

If @joet simply added an extra paragraph to that poll to explain why the change was wanted there probably wouldn’t be half as much complaining. And after that a post about its implementation would have been nice, preferably before it went ahead but after would be fine too so we at least could have a meaningful discussion about it. It was clear there were some early issues where partial searches appear to work for some and not others. We didn’t know if this was a bug or intentional or what.

I know exactly what you’re getting at here but I can’t really see what way ABI benefits from the new search? I have a feeling a change to a feature this important was primarily based on reducing server costs (so probably joe’s own decision?), as presumably this new search is far more optimised than the in-house one previously in place, in fact still in place on the main website. Search is a notoriously difficult thing to get right in database-rich websites, and very resource-intensive.

In any case I really hope he posts his own thoughts and reasons for making this change.

1 Like
25

Basicly I was hoping the ZX guys were a bit out of touch with the community and they proposed some changes that wouldn’t work in practice and that Joe (being the experienced guy he is) would know better. I’d like to think that Joe knows how to run Ratebeer, but he now has a company to answer to breathing down his neck. I also like to think that’s why he posted the poll, to show the other guys: Look, this is not what the community wants.

However, like everyone else, I don’t know if anything of this is true, since we aren’t being talked to. It’s probably very far-fetched and all speculation though.

Expressing myself in English sometimes adds to me not explaining myself well I think.

26

This, this, so much this.

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27

Yeah I agree with you completely, you explained yourself well don’t worry. I suppose by virtue of joe choosing not to do explain anything, we can say that possibly it was not entirely his decision. But yeah, you’re right, we can only speculate until we’re told why the change was made.

28

Where is this new search? I use Ratebeer a LOT and I haven’t encountered it yet.

29

Here it is: https://ratebeer.com/phoenixsearch
You’ll find it if you search from the forums instead of the main homepage.

30

Looks like the thread where we all begged not to change this was removed.

https://community.ratebeer.com/t/all-users-please-vote-search-function-change-proposal/2974/6?source_topic_id=3029
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31

Didn’t you knew this already, our opinion is totally irrelevant.

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32

Wow. That’s either a very unfortunate error - or one of the most childish moves I’ve seen on here for a while. It was bad enough nobody officially speaking for the site ever explained why the search should be changed in the proposed way. But what the hell is this now?

1 Like
33

I guess it’s time to backup my ratings again


1 Like
34

Partial searches work great on the new search page, what are you guys talking about?

35

Tried partial search everywhere the search field appears (frontpage, forum pages etc). Works fine for me. Am I missing something?

36

Yeah, I mentioned above that it looks like they DID actually take what we said into consideration. I haven’t used it a ton, but it looks like the new search function is an actual improvement.

That said, it just kind of rolled out one day with no real explanation, so the optics were pretty bad. The folks that have been here for awhile know that this kind of thing really isn’t anything new.

It would be great if literally any of the higher level admins left the bubble of the admin forum and communicated with us plebs on the normal forums every once in awhile.

37

After people responded so strongly to the poll, they shouldn’t have rolled out anything to the live version of the website without some sort of communication or patchnotes.

2 Likes
38

This. And why get rid of the thread without any word?

2 Likes
39

I just wanted to chime in to say I can confirm this new phoenix search has definitely been improved in the past couple of days. It’s recognising partial/fragmented search terms and finding the exact beer I want. It’s working well. I’m happy.

What I am baffled by is joet has actually been posting in the last 24 hours but is still choosing to ignore this whole debacle. Why!? You’ve gone against STRONG community wishes and changed an important function of the site, you’ve caused outrage and distrust because of it. You’ve then fixed your shortcomings and made search actually better now, yet still no official word on what’s going on. All you had to do was make one simple post about it and you wouldn’t have caused such a riff in the community. I just don’t understand what’s going on here. Are you trying to drive users away now?

40

It’s not working well enough if it won’t show me whether I already had that beer or not.

1 Like
41

Get out of your pleb bubble: there is nothing going on in the admin forums. This is joe and his dev team only. Only thing posted on admin forums are requests from admins to communicate with everyone of us. Admins are left in the dark just as much as you do. Stop blaming the wrong people

6 Likes