Fix the current site. 100% priority.
Anyone new being attracted to the site is not going to rave to their friends about any new features added, they will simply moan about how old fashioned, clunky and weird the place is.
I think you either return to the legacy RateBeer with the integrated forum, or you start again from scratch. Or possibly do both. But to continue to tinker with the current site doesn’t seem to me to be addressing the real issues.
Hi.
I think a “mute mode” would be great. What I mean is an option that would hide every scores and ratings. In my opinion, that would make the “rating experience” much more interesting. For the moment, I just use Ratebeer to register my ratings.
Cheers 
Vincent.
Holy shit, another Titus Groan fan!
Ya, I noticed it too. Surprising how well I remember those books having read them at age 14.
Make a big list of all the bugs that are currently plaguing the site and that haven’t been addressed (there are tonnes of them that we users have wrote about) and then set about fixing them. I mean even the small inconsistencies that could be easily fixed but have been simply ignored. For example the “Most Difficult Countries to Drink” page says there are 224 countries, while the “Most Rated Countries” page says there are 249 countries. Surely things like this can’t be too hard to change.
In short, please sort out all the bugs/inconsistencies/errors that have accumulated over the years before adding any MAJOR new features. And perhaps focus on making life for the admins easier.
And maybe fixing charsets would be nice. I’m sick of workarounds - both the butt ugly style names that we have because of that now - and idiocies like saving all čćđž characters like ccdz in Place reviews. Pull RB kicking and screaming into 2010 at least with that.
I’m gonna play devil’s advocate here, not because I agree with it, but because it is what it is. The tech company playbook right now has companies building features first, dropping old or low engagement features second, and fixing bugs a distant third. It is simply not profitable for the company or wise as a growth strategy to fix 100% of bugs and polish up front; you only do that once you know a product is sticky and growing and that people want to use it.
Ratebeer, right now, is obviously not sticky, and obviously not growing. The people here complaining about bugs are (sorry guys) people that have no intention of leaving even if the bugs persist. What Ratebeer needs is a huge influx of new users, and you aren’t going to get that with bug fixes and restyling dead pages. Maybe if Ratebeer builds something people actually want to use and a few hundred thousand users show up, they will be able to hire more engineers to actually start fixing bugs and build a consistent visual style, but until we get there, it’s gonna be status quo for a while.
Unfortunately, the reality here seems to be that a director pitched this to Joe—“build a new feature to save your site or it’s lights out” (maybe)—but he doesn’t know for sure what to build, hence this thread. It’s worth a shot, I guess, but it may have made more sense to run a poll with a few fleshed out ideas up top rather than brainstorming with a bunch of old curmudgeons.
Actually, lemme restate that: I do agree with it. Yes, this site is broken, probably worse than ever, but it is dead if something doesn’t come along and save it, and bug fixes aren’t going to save it.
You make a very good point and I see where you are coming from. However if that is the case then they are asking the wrong people. Apart from fixing bugs one of the main improvements listed from regulars has been breaking down more countries into regions which I would like but is pure stato territory. What you are suggesting is about enticing a whole new audience. I guess there is still potential for Ratebeer to be a smaller but more ‘serious about beer’ Untapped, but you would have to link in better with social media in some way.to gain a slice of the craft beer scene particularly from Facebook.
And that will be bombed from day one due to RB’s connection with ABI, as if Untappd (and now BA through it) wasn’t a money-grubbing venture with questionable/unknown financial backing (which might be ABI as well for all anyone outside of the company knows).
Puzzl’s right about the “playbook”, that’s what they’ve been going with from day one, with the mistake of relying on very much clueless people with “ideas” on what to change and do to attract people (which they failed at, as expected, after the attempt to turn RB into a dumber version of UT backfired), and with the marketing part, what little of it was attempted outside of Australia, being heavily crippled (coming from a position where it’s “popular” to hate you because you’re linked to the big bad guy that was again to be expected, but nobody seems to have bothered much anyway). And those who would come anyway would come to an angry user base, which started to shed heavily - but not after the ownership reveal, those numbers were low, but because of the bugs, temporary removal of features which became de facto permanent, general bad/awful decisions that were stubbornly defended and the user base patronised - and let’s not forget the godawful treatment of admins, when we couldn’t do our job properly because of wonderful ideas.
Funny thing is - some awesome ideas were suggested in the past, but were entirely ignored. I’m not about to go rummaging through the boards to dig them up, why not make some effort reading through what people were suggesting for a change?
Also a fucking fantastic feature would be to be able to actually get Google results for beer pages on Ratebeer. That was broken and reported to Joe weeks ago, but it’s still broken, and it should be the biggest priority ATM.
If you’re going to draw anyone to the site, that’s kinda the first thing that needs to be done, otherwise how’s anyone going to stumble into RB…
Pretty much every business out there exists to make money. If RB found a way to be money grubbing venture (that is to be self sustainable) it wouldn’t be in this situation. There is a big difference between ABI and business making money. ABI was and still is hurting small breweries and beer culture all around the world. I don’t see untappd or (especially) BA doing that.
Who’s to say that Untappd’s financial backers are not hurting small breweries and beer culture?
But in any case props to them for successfully charging people, both place owners and users, through the nose for what is available for free or much cheaper elsewhere Not their fault that the definition of everything that RB does officially for promotion would be “calling it half-assed would be giving it far too much credit”…
Ah the good old times when people complained about “having” to pay 13 dollars a year for RB Premium… Back when it meant much more and you’d get a set of stats still unmatched elsewhere.
That said… I’m still fascinated how many idiotic decisions you can make. Like, take the feed - let’s remove the social part of it and introduce moronic patronizing and incorrect automatic comments instead! Wow, how great! And then after everyone gets pissed off wonder why everyone’s pissed off and leave things broken / not working for ages, hiding it away, so that we are forced to see the same few beers every time we log into ratebeer.com instead.
Or - adding likes to reviews. People think that wow - maybe we’ll get some social aspects, the kind that create a community, draw people in, maybe we’ll get comments too. No no no, that’s not how RB LLC rolls, RB LLC took as inspiration a couple of places where the like option is used for something completely different - like, I mean, why would anyone want to ever know who thought that their review was great. Pfft. So the idea never, ever takes off in any sensible manner. But RB LLC knows better, fuck all y’all others and your stupid ideas! (only it suddenly became PLEAZ GIBE IDEAS soon enough).
I’ll just stop thinking about it, I’ll just become fucking livid seeing what I wasted thousands on thousands on thousands of hours on.
Well who is to say they are? 
I’d stick to the known facts.
Untappd found a sustainable business model acceptable to both breweries and users. And those categories care less and less about RB.
Hey, they had Goose Island ads running for the longest time, just about until the backlash against RB for the takeover, someone might’ve just acted smarter in that case.
I would not staunchly defend them either when the facts around them are unknown. I do respect them for taking over a niche that others were too broke or lazy to expand on and then dominating the market from there, catering entirely to the lowest common denominator, once others have helped create a market where a population of such users could be drawn from.
I remember hearing about a way to scrape social media to auto add beers. I really think this is probably one of the most useful features that could be implemented. Obviously a lot of work, but being able to add to the database in an automated way seems to be useful.
A man was born on a surfboard. One day, a huge wave rolls by, and the man gets taken on the ride of his life.
The man begins to identify himself as a surfer. He goes out, brags about riding the massive wave, and a couple sponsors take notice.
Unfortunately, the man had never learned to stand up: he’d merely been taken for a ride in the place where he’d always been.
I think we safely can say that most hve heard about The Emperor’s New Clothes.
THe site is flooded with bugs mostly minor bugs like incorect calculations, missing links and so on.
Not to mentioned the small bug we had just after new year where it took Joet and the service team more than 2 weeks just to start respoding on the massive complaints. Untill it was fixed it was almost imposibele to use the site.
Experience is that each time they have been intorducing new features it has been follwed with loads of new bugs.
If you want to sell a car make sure you clean and polish it first.
Again, this is expected and standard. When a product is great and engaging, people with flock to it regardless of bugs, even game breaking ones, like constant crashes. Hell, there’s this videogame that just came out last weekend out of nowhere called Fall Guys that’s been insanely popular and is riddled with bugs. You can barely make it through a game often times. But it’s overflowing with players, because it’s really fun.
It doesn’t matter that Ratebeer’s new features are buggy, because no one is using them anyway. If a ton of people were using them, the bugs would be fixed. Because people are not, the features will be forgotten, and another attempt will be made.
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