Places are the best and the most frustrating part of our site currently. The place that makes us stand out, potentially the most relevant part of the site but also, because of neglect, getting obsolete in many areas, with many potentially great options not developed well and because editing by users was removed (for good reasons, but, honestly, too long a time ago). They will only become worse and worse over years, and it’s in nobody’s interest, especially ZX/ABI/RBLLC’s for the site to lose value because of that.
What can be done:
Option 1:
-Allow premium users and connected users to suggest edits through a page that will look like the edit page. The changes will not immediately take place.
-Expand the Verify Places admin page to contain suggested change propositions - let admins to confirm or dismiss them.
Also, some incentive can be provided to the non-premium users, like if enough corrections are approved, they get Premium for a period etc.
Option 2
-Allow premium users (and linked users and potentially users with a large enough amount of overall ratings) to edit Places.
-In Admin places verification tool add a special section for “last edited by non-admin” and maybe an option to revert changes. Not great but I assume easier to implement.
More steps can be undertaken, maybe a popup wtih rules / tips on editing, which I’ll be more than happy to write or help write.
It is my interest to fix places. As far as the US I have updated thousands of places in the last few months. If there are cities in the US for which I have not done an initial cleaning and you as a user are traveling there I can do that for you. As always I appreciate your work and dedication to places Marko. I do have limitations and myself post in the places thread when I cannot fix places. Adding premium users to help fix places may be a good idea. Having a popup with rules / tips on editing would be gold.
We are pretty much on top of places for UK, lots of feedback from users, catching up with photos. Not sure I want associated people’s input as details tend to get exaggerated.
And yet, one of the top 3 brewpubs in the country for 2019 was not a brewpub for 10.5 years allegedly.
But, okay, let’s call that the one that got away and say that you’re right - you guys are definitely doing a great job otherwise in general! However, there’s the small matter of the rest of the world where that’s not necessarily the case. What I’m suggesting would let admins revert / review user edits, so you nobody would fuck things up behind your back.
I think it is a good idea, but you will need to convince somebody that can make this happen. If you have other ideas to improve places in which I can assist I am interested in helping.
Like the Ratebeer itself the places section is deteriorating and becoming less and less relevant. If you check this years place awards you’ll see bunch of places with handful of reviews not just in 2019, but in last 3 or 4 years.
Even though Places isn’t something I personally use much I completely agree with everything you say Marko. I recognise it is (or perhaps “was”, now) a very valuable part of the website.
I came here to say that I think the options you’re proposing are decent, either of them would be helpful, and that I strongly believe it’s needed not just for places but for beers too.
I feel like I submit numerous corrections every week (it would be nice to see a count of this btw, to highlight helpful users), mostly it’s simple stuff like adding a description or a minor style change from stout - imperial to stout - imperial flavoured for example, things that take mere seconds for someone to verify. Some get accepted. Some don’t. I’ve just scrolled through a few pages of my latest ratings and I can still see beers that haven’t been updated, I got as far back as the beginning of December - not going to bother going further.
I also submitted reports of a couple of duplicate beers, and they still exist separately. The beers are all admin verified too which is odd. People don’t read labels correctly or just don’t understand the rules (only collaborating breweries go in the beer name, not a clothing company!). It seems like we need better tools all round both on the user side and the admin side… but I digress now…
So my actual point: I’ve not had Premium for a couple of years because of the sorry state the website is in. But if it gave me some power to actually help out and get shit done then maybe I’d have a reason to pay again. As a stats nerd I do miss seeing the stats pages (which I believe is the only benefit currently?), but I’m not paying for that one perk when my money is clearly not being used to fund development of the site.
It’s just so demoralising seeing this site falling apart, things not getting done…
Oh and that ridiculously frustrating login issue still exists. 99% of the time trying to tag a beer will log me out. The site is so broken. So many problems to fix.
It might be worth considering for you to post in the tagged “Beers” thread. At least a fee admins (Including myself) look at that and routinely make all the changes requested. We have switched hundreds of beers to correct styles in connection with this thread in the past few weeks.
Yeah I guess I will, I don’t really post on these forums much any more but it seems like it’s the only way to ensure things get done. I’ll have to go through my ratings again and figure out which still need fixing, I’ll get a list together and post them all in the thread later tonight.
There is a huge backlog honestly. I plowed through some 200+ yesterday, will do the same today hopefully.
6 months ago we were unable to work on bug reports properly due to a bug that we had to wait for over a month to be fixed, a bug that both made work on them highly frustrating and affected non-RB browsing (don’t ask). Guess that some people just lost the habit (I know I did, but I also do a ton of stuff everywhere and can’t do everything anyway), some gave up… and the whole login logout issue certainly didn’t help things recently. Absolutely nobody can blame them/us.
