RateBeer Missive 2017-11-10

Site News
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OK, sorry I’m late. We’ve just finished an ambitious week.

This is my first post in the fora. Let’s talk about that.

This week we’ve launched the new forums, based on Discourse. The preliminary numbers look really good with many people, new and old, jumping in to check them out and comment. It’s interesting that we saw greater interest after the first initial 24 hours. RateBeerians tend to observe first and then act later. These fora are very feature rich and configurable. I built the last forums myself by hand and intentionally kept them very bare bones to make them very simple and easy to use. The reason we went with a very feature-rich, social media-like software package is because this is what people know and tend to like. The truth is that we’ll never reclaim audiences taken from us by Facebook but we can make RateBeer visits more fun for a few of the tens of thousands of raters who visit daily.

Props to Craig, JulienHuxley, LazyPyro, Maracuja051, and Ominous for leading the charge in making the new forums feel very lived in. Cheers!

Also this week we debuted the a new leaderboard, the Beer Spotter’s leaderboard. It features weekly, this month and this year views and a switch to see industry or non industry.
https://www.ratebeer.com/users/topbeerspotters.asp

Another big endeavor was polishing our criteria for brewer scores and running our first few batches of numbers. The criteria got good feedback from a couple admins and I’ll have lists to show them so we can hone the indices that comprise the battery well before RateBeer Best.

Something fun and related, I’m writing a segment this weekend for Forbes Magazine loosely based on our preliminaries of best American breweries which provided some urgency around getting this done this week. I’ll talk to Gary about a publishing date and share that with you next week, if it’s not out digitally already.

The mobile app is quickly coming along. We’re still working out the best way to add beers and will have that out soon. Thanks so much for the feedback and please let us know if you have additional thoughts.

Cheers!

Joe

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On brewer scores, the big issue that I see is that many regional and large breweries that are mediocre at best seem to score inexplicably high - maybe the fact that some of them have a handful of highly regarded, but often non-permanent beers, has something to do with that - whereas solid, if unspectacular, micros tend to score far lower.

And, in the UK at least, many very good micros in less-travelled places have some excellent beers but don’t get enough ratings to overcome their scores being weighted downwards towards the mid point. So, consequently, the brewers don’t score as highly as perhaps they should. I’m not sure there’s anything that can be done about that with the current weighting system though.

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Well, lets keep the weighing system, to keep the homers at bay. Its there for a reason, lets not make history repeat itself :grin:

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And please, let’s have this discussion on weighted axes related to brewer scores contained to Admins There’s an active discussion there where your input is encouraged.

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R.I.P. Golden Troll

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Another win for @gary! I’m glad to hear he’s still one of your most valuable consultants. shn