I’ll give it a last go. I’ve stopped filling in the feedback thing that pops up every now and then.
I don’t rate a lot of beers at a time and I often (>70% of the time) sit and write my review and score in a text file as I drink the first half of it, then look at RateBeer to get information about the beer I’m drinking at the time.
Here’s what I used to do:
Search for the beer I’m drinking and add it if necessary. I can still do this. At least when you have complete information, the search works fine. I do add a lot more beers than I used to, but I do have more ratings than most Australians. I used to type out the full text of what was on the bottle but don’t any more.
Compare my score to the average. A quick glance at this tells me whether I liked the beer around as much as other people or not. For some styles I expect to be in the top third of raters, for others around the lower middle - a glance at the average tells me whether this is true in a second. This no longer works for beers with few ratings. It used to be that the unweighted average was featured on the main page and the stats page, but now it isn’t. Since many Australian and NZ beers have few ratings, this makes summary information about the beer inaccessible.For beers with few ratings, the better the beer the worse the weighted average is.
For beers with 50-200 ratings, glance at the “who’s rated this” page. This will show if there are any obvious outliers - so if most people seem to think it’s a 3.2 but Joris thinks it’s a 4, it jumps out at you. Of course it might be different people for different styles. The scores on the “who’s rated this” page have been removed, so this doesn’t work at all.
Leaving the main page open, open a tab to rate in and the stats page; paste in my text and score. The stats page has (temporarily?) no link to it, but you can still get to it from the new rating page by editing the url manually. But you can’t right click the “full review” button to open it in a new tab. You have to duplicate the tab twice in order to have the 3 pages open at once. This is clumsy and stupid but still works.
Have a look at the histogram on the stats page. Am I about where I’d expect for this type of beer? When I’m consistently high it’s a fair sign that i like that sort of beer or that brewery more than average. That’s how I found that I mostly like De Ranke and mostly dislike Oskar Blues relative to most people here. This guides future purchases. I can still do this.
See what’s happened over time by looking at the Bayesian score and true average over time. That way you can easily see for example that it’s not that I liked a particular Meantime fruit beer way more than most people, it’s just that as luck would have it a single infected bottle found its way to Denmark in 2008 and without those dozen ratings mine looks normal. Or that this top 50 hefe is only plummeting in ratings since it started being bottled a year ago. Or that locals always thought this IPA was really good, there’s just broad agreement now. Can’t do this at all now. And rating dates are pointlessly obfuscated (no doubt using a more sophisticated piece of code than a date stamp but for no discernible purpose – doesn’t even create whitespace.
Compare what I smelled and tasted (and what I liked and didn’t) with people who liked the beer a lot and hated it a lot. Click the top page or two, click the bottom page or two. Often a fair number of both will be idiots (liked it but gave it the default .5 score by accident/ this is not as good as random local beer/ the best beer ever/ comes in a green bottle so it must be bad etc) but there will usually be someone who hates a beer who says something describing their experience you can understand even if you don’t agree. And that’s how I learnt about what people who like about dark lagers see in them and why people who’ve had lots of tripels think this one is mediocre. And I look at what I’ve said and see if my mind has changed and try and appreciate both the good and the limitations of the beer I’m still drinking. This information is mostly hidden now. Seeing more than a handful of ratings is a hassle and the continuous scroll rather than pagination means it’s very slow for anything more than a couple of dozen ratings. You can’t get to the last few rating easily.
Better still, you can’t even see the text of ratings as you scroll, even after you’ve selected “see all ratings”! This, at least, must be a mistake – what’s the point of scrolling though what you can’t read?
Submit rating, send corrections, add tags, send photo, add barcode, availability information. The first 3 still work fine, although it’s a shame tags haven’t become more used. Yes, there’s been some downtime for ratings but nothing unusual and with privacy changes, weird bugs crop up. Corrections seem to go through and usually quickly.
I used to take a note of where I bought things, take photos and add barcodes. I mostly don’t now. With photos, a system that worked changed to something that maybe sometimes did – and I got out of the habit. With the others, I kind of felt my contributions to a public or club resource had been appropriated and again, got out of the habit.
I hope @joet and @services you can see the point to the laborious detail about how I used to rate a beer. Following this procedure since 2009 gave me a lot of information that helped me get a better appreciation of all sorts of beer. And most of it I can’t do now. These are not bugs. Only 6. would affect resource use, I suspect. They are decisions that make it much harder to get information from RateBeer. Which now leaves rating here, for me, as just somewhere to dump my text.
I can, and sometimes I can’t. On rare occasions putting a beer into “1” gives a “2” list with the right beer, but clicking on that beer doesn’t get to “3” - nothing happens. I’d say about 10% of the time for me - but that’s based on memory. I’ve started wondering whether it has something to do with disparate geographic locations between me and the beer origin of production or spread of distribution. @services
Great post. Doesn’t sum up all my major annoyances but it definitely comes close. Tbh I can’t be bothered anymore. Nothing changes. Nobody listens anyway. User, at least long time user experience, clearly doesn’t count anymore.
MonsterMagnet1d
I don’t if this has been mentioned already, as I can’t keep up with all the (ever changing) mess. But the most recent ratings on a beer page doesn’t (always?) show the most recent ratings anymore. I click on a beer rating from someone on my friends list and the top ‘most recent’ rating is ‘24 days ago’. I click the ‘my friends’ tab and it shows the new rating with ‘1 hour ago’.
Come on, this is basic functionality!
All This!!! Also If your rate a beer after 7 p.m. Us Central standard time it shows you rated the beer the next day. Rate a beer at 7:20 p.m. on 6/1 it comes up as a rating on 6/2.
Such a bullshit… Sort of ratings still not working. For example: Erzengel rated “Captain Lawrence Cuvee de Castleton” yesterday. I’d like to read the rating. Sort the ratings “most recent” it doesnt show me his rating. Why?
I really miss the “old” ratebeer we had a year ago or so… The site is getting more and more complicated and confusing… Please stop all the new features that dont make any sense and destroy all the good things here on the site!
The so-called “smart” system seems to think his rating is not in English and as a result has put it at the very bottom of the list, after the ratings from “about 11 years ago”. Indeed this is very stupid. I noticed the same thing recently when live rating with a RateBeer buddy who also rates in English. Instead of filing his rating at the top where it should have been it was placed under ratings from several weeks ago.
I usually don’t see my own ratings in the mMost Recent column after I’ve just saved them. It’s not weird, it’s a big lapse of judgement to implement something like this under the banner of “Most Recent”.
I still hate this lack of choice for the language I want to see this website in. That workaround didn’t work for me and I basically just stopped rating again. Can’t get over it.
I feel very much the same way, but it worked for me after @joet contacted me and debugged it. So at least the workaround is now okay. Still shitty that all the other websites now assume I want the english version as well.
Not sure if anyone had touched on this … something I’ve noticed in past week.
If a friend has just rated a beer and I click on it to read their review … I don’t always see it where as it used to go the top. Now it may be in the middle of the list … it may be on the next page.
@services … if I click on a friends rating … I want to see it !
Noticed that as well. Sucks if you do a trade, see that the person has rated one of the beers you’ve sent - and then you’re still left searching for their review because it’s not at the end of the link you used to click to get there.
Wanted to check @jfb’s rating of a beer, so I went on his page and clicked the beer, which should take me to his rating. There are 11 ratings, his rating is the most recent, they are all in English, and guess which one rating Ratebeer decided not to show when showing “Most Recent”? jfb’s. Well played.
Is there any plans to fix the sorting of the ratings (aka the basic functionallity)? At the moment the newest ratings are not on the top, even when the sorting is by most recent. @joet@services ?
Also IMO the beer page should show the actual brewer. For an admin it makes no sense to do the adminning of gypsy stuff, it is not shown on the beer page. For me one of the advantages of RB is (was?!) that you could see the actual brewer…
