Good point.
But the point being you are 5-6 active users in NZ rating beers… Here in the grand Montreal area, beers hit easily 10-100 notes within a week or 2 with Untappd but they almost never get a displayed % score on RB because of low rating count, and even worse, only their weighted average score is displayed…
Why compare to Untappd? It’s a different platform. The point of ratebeer is for people who wish to think about the beers they drink in more detail and share reviews of them, rather than just collate ticks. Of course more people are happy to take the five seconds to throw a tick on untappd than they are to spend five minutes or so making detailed notes on each beer.
When people say this site is dying they should compare it to this site in the past, not a dumbed down alternative.
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Agreed here. And it amuses me when people try to equate textless Untappd ticks with RB rates. A simpler site, less demanding intellectually/work-wise, will always have attraction for a far wider audience (which simply isn’t interested in or doesn’t have the time for elaborating). The fact that it had a proper, well made app from the start helped.
And that’s why all the dumbing down that the new devs seemed to have in their minds at first (and here and there show even now) was and is a spectacularly atrocious idea. RB can and should do both, but never, ever lose things that make it, well, Ratebeer.
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Good point too. But we need a certain mass to stay relevant and even if you don’t care about relevancy, to stay alive. I really don’t get what the problem is in doing just that. The users have more or less agreed on about 8-10 things that the site needs in order to be attractive to both old and potential new users. But nothing gets done. Yeah the “hang in there it’s on the list of things to do” is always around the corner. But this isn’t something to put on the list, this should be on top of the list! Make the site attractive to use again! Reward people who contribute! With awards / badges / medals, whatever. Make sure there’s a way to shut it off for each individual user so he or she can control her own user experience. More statistics. Make premium worth it. Give back details (date rated for instance) instead of vague lines (“rated about a month ago”) and for God’s sake stop try to fix things that aren’t broken!
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As for that “month ago” - I’m still baffled as to why would they do that and have yet to hear one single person who thinks that’s an improvement in any way. The users don’t like it, and it fucks admin work up as well. Someone must absolutely hate numbers. I’d absolutely love to hear from whoever thought of this and approved of this with the reasoning why. To try and convince any of us that it wasn’t just tinkering for tinkering’s sake.
Frustrating how sometimes half-baked ideas get implemented instantly without asking for feedback (or asking and then implementing the unfinished site with all the fuckups and a “we’ll fix it later on”), but if that’s what the system’s gonna be, forums will be the place where feedback is given, and words may (and likely will) not be nice.
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You shouldn’t view this from the developer perspective, but the user perspective. Yes it’s a single page, but it is by far the most important page on RB. So if you redesign this page radically it equals a total redesign for the user. And if half of the information (including some really important, like real average score!) on this page is gone overnight, many users were used to for years, it’s no surprise that many users (including myself) are alienated by this change.
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I migrated to untappd while things were kind of shaky here. Thought about putting all the ratings I did in the meantime here but there are so many awful flaws.
Biggest flaw I found. I rate beer for memories, for notes, to know when I had that beer and what I thought about it. “My review” does not show date! I can see it on the app, not the exact date but how many years ago.
Also, why is the site clinging to having to put in words in the review. I want to rate everything on my phone on the go. I am not going to write the minimum of characters just because I have to do it.
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Can’t you just “tick” the beer then, or am I missing something here?
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I’ve been trying to rate a beer for about an hour, I cannot do anything on ratebeer while logged in. I keep getting an error
The page cannot be displayed because an internal server error has occurred.
I tried two different browsers + the one on my phone, nothing works.
This is it for me, guys. I am out. I am tired of the errors and tired of the increasingly slow and cumbersome UI. I will no longer rate here. AB InBev wins.
Easy now. The site was down briefly. That happens everywhere. Whatever the frustrations with the site recently, it hasn’t happened much here.
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Ratebeer has been about the ticks as long as I have been here. Most rating text is useless - especially when they go over the beer’s main attributes in brief (and I am as guilty of this as anyone) from a sip’s worth of beer.
I think it fair to say the numbers matter more and that is not related really to written reviews. If it were, BA would not have an average B+ rating. Most of it is simply experience.
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@Sarlacc83 That’s exactly my thought. I wrote so many ratings that I started feeling I was always writing the same thing for similar beers. This is why I turned to ticks (expert ticks with the app) because I feel the 5 point score is as relevant than a full review and it let me more time to enjoy my tasting with friends instead of being on my phone all the time. In the end, it’s not the text review that will make people chase for a specific product, it’s its score (and sometimes rarity)
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I disagree. I often read through reviews before deciding on whether or not to buy a beer. Numbers mean nothing, especially not on a site with so many random clickers as UT. But also on RB, the words often make me decide, not the numbers.
It’s rate beer, not tickbeer.
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I agree. Moreover, reading beer reviews has often aided me in determining that a beer I was poured is actually the correct beer. Aroma, viscosity, bitterness, etc… are inportant and if they are not written in a review, I know I will not find them on untappd.
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The absolute worst thing about RateBeer at the moment is member negativity.
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Maybe people somehow missed it but Ratebeer has been pushing the tick flow for quite a while now. That’s why we compare it to Untappd. Thinking Ratebeer still cares about long and detailed user rates is delusional, because the focus has long been elsewhere.
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That’s fine, but just say it then. Say “dear users, we are shifting focus to ticking. A rating with long text will no longer be possible. You are welcome to stay but if you want the good old days you might not like it, because we no longer offer what you are looking for.”
Hard to stay positive when nothing changes for the better. And I’m talking about personal user experience, not from an objective pov from a programmer. The things I ‘need’, the pages I visit, the stats I find useful; nothing has improved. Nothing.
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