I do indeed believe that is possible to some extent. However, it is clear as water that the Greek brewery is helped by some well-meaning folks who boosted the ratings in such way that is most probably not representative of the actual quality, popularity, and availability of the beers under rating.
I can identify at least 5 people (see below) who 1) claim to be from Greece; 2) give systematically extraordinary high scores for the brewery compared to the other beers they rated; 3) do not have more than 12 or so ratings; and 4) showed a particular pattern of rating in which they made an account around June '17, rated a couple of beers, logged off until Nov '17, logged in again and gave another high rating for a beer this brewery released (or did this all in Nov '17 only), and never rated or logged in again.
This is compounded by 3-4 users who showed a similar pattern, except that they did not reach the minimum of 10 ratings - possibly having misunderstood the instructions of the brewer.
Interesting. I didn’t have the time to take a closer look at this but from the users you mentioned, I see their ratings consist of more greek beers and yes 7 Island scores the highest but it could be a matter of availability too. For example from the users you mentioned…
katerinaniss : Jai Alai 4.6 / Citra Blast 4.7 (one is sitting in a warehouse, the other one is distributed as fresh as possible)
SteliosA Citra Blast (fresh of course) 4.2 De Molen Amarillo 3.5, seems legit as De Molen still sits on the shelves at the local AH, for example, let alone travel to Greece.
gouipa Citra Blast 4.7 but Tree House Julius 5 (I know people in Greece that are getting Tree House, Other Half etc as fresh as possible so that could explain availability as well)
On an additional note, Ratebeer’s user with most ratings, fonefan, has given Citra Blast a 4.1.
@Zlotta says that with 11 ratings your beer can win a Ratebeer Best prize, and that some ratings were misplaced, resulting a beer winning a Best Beer prize.
Do you think @joet is still in charge? It was a minority sale as he said back then but all those things you mentioned make it seem he doesn’t have any say at all.
Well personally I wouldn’t jump straight into saying he’s been pushed out already. I can’t see how that would actually happen right now, should be relatively safe with the remaining 75% shouldn’t he? I’m no expert on things like that.
The things I mentioned are definitely cause for concern. But I mean realistically I can’t see much benefit to ABI folks pushing for the search change, as I said in the other thread I can guess this was pushed through to save on server resources despite us all being against it.
Would ABI be against promoting RBB? Maybe, but why exactly? They wouldn’t even be in the running for the majority of them, and the fact they are still going ahead… surely they would have just motioned for them to be completely cancelled? Given joe’s lack of activity this lack of promotion could be mere oversight on his part, presumably he’s pretty busy with something?
Finally the Compile Ratings feature has been broken for a long time, we think since the changes to ticks were made. Those of us stuck with ticks on aliased beers seem to be the ones affected, this is something that joet said he would remove but still hasn’t, I guess it’s not high priority, and again, due to joe’s presumed being so busy.
Of course this is all speculation. I can see both sides of the coin on all the issues I mentioned but as most people here I’m not happy about any of them and still hope for an explanation.
Have you tried recently? I compiled my stuff 2 days ago without any major trouble. It’s a bit of a pain to combine them all in a mastersheet without encountering problems like special characters being fucked and having 2 different date notations, but the compiling and downloading part worked fine for me.
Compile Ratings problem is connected to ticks. I had trouble compiling the ratings as well, but it was fixed after I’ve converted my 2 ticks to ratings.
Go on your profile on your ratings and click on ticks only. If you have any there you have to delete them for compile ratings to work. Problem is if the beer has since been aliased there is no way to remove the tick.
Folks who were also active in the old forums, please correct me if I remember this incorrectly. I seem to remember a discussion in the old forums that RBB won’t be a big event this year because there’s no resources for this - and probably since the scene was generally uneasy to hostile concerning the minority stake. I even thought it wasn’t happening at all.
I can’t compile my ratings as well, my aliased ticks are still there, too. Apart from that, I still cannot see my 2017 in beer. Would love to see that getting fixed at some point.
The front page that consists of megabyte after megabyte of image loading?
Does anyone by choice start there any more? My bookmark is my latest activity.
How does that work with showing your ticked and non-ticked beers in a brewery listing or a search result, as the empty box and ticked box are both images?
My solution is to just add this as an adblock rule:
||ratebeer.com/images/fd/*
Looking at the hits, I’ve saved myself a couple of gigs even though I try to avoid that page like the plague.
