Terrible update. These changes will only alienate the loyal and active users on this site. Things have been progressively going downhill ever since the ‘investment’.
Facebook’s news feed presents things in a random order so that I’m constantly confused by updates from several days ago. As a consequence, I barely use facebook anymore. Would be disappointing if I stopped using this site because the latest activity feed isn’t fit for purpose.
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Agreed. Ordering things by what algorithims assume we think is important is never a good idea. Not a good idea on facebook, but done for advertising purposes, stupid and pointless on RBz
The Activity Feed is down now 
“The page cannot be displayed because an internal server error has occurred.”
Is your not in chroniligocal order now? Mine started to appear in chronological order yesterday.
Although today I can’t access the feed and the ratings I was viewing earlier reverted the to screens from X number of months ago.
Presume they’re making updates. Hence it stuttering today.
I’m just responding to others’ concerns - nothing is loading except the forum today 
Edit: Which is actually another point in favour of the app having offline ratings since I can’t search for anything currently.
It’s all about me. I really used the page to keep track of my recent actions. Let’s go back to the old version. My sharing buddy and I also used it to make sure we hadn’t lost track of ratings during the sharing. Checking the beers rated list is a lot less easy - trust me.
They must be making a lot of updates then as it’s still down. 14 hours later.
So I’m feeling a little damned if you do, damned if you don’t. The old page wasn’t working, people were complaining and the page was causing site-wide performance problems, so I elected to rewrite the page. Reviewers were consulted along the whole time of development (just two weeks) and over a dozen updates were made from feedback.
If people don’t like either version, I’ll acquiesce to shutting this down entirely for anyone with over 500 ratings, or allowing an explicit opt in.
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Personally I think the main issues people were complaining about would be pretty easy to fix: chronological order and seeing individual beer ratings rather than just a tally. But unless I am mistaken, those were in place yesterday?
As to the complaints about what it looks like, as long as I can rate beers don’t really care.
I’m hoping the rest of us get here real quick. The page (when I can get it running again, it’s a huge series of hurdles I need to cross to get single updates now) is set to add more features, and I’m hoping we can be in a place to look at those as not just “different from the page I’m used to” and “hey, these new features are pretty cool”. Again, we aren’t there yet, but I hope to be soon.
I got the impression that people had not noticed the chronological fix and were still complaining about the previous version.
I don’t really see how this new feed loses any of the functionality of the old one. You can still see when friends rate beers, you can still see when places are rated, you can still see when new beers are added. What are people angry we lost? It is certainly good that it is fixed so that people rating beers do actually show up on the feed. It is certainly good that it is up to date code that you can edit in the future to add more features and to fix anything that breaks.
I don’t really understand the constant negativity people have towards any type of change, and the rudeness they display about it on this site is pretty bizarre. If people critiqued my work the way a few people here respond to you, I would quit my job and go and live in the mountains and never talk to anyone again. Hopefully you are more emotionally robust.
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You don’t see how the new feed loses functionality of the old one? We have lost the ability to see rates over the last 24 hours. We have lost the ability to see our own activity. We no longer see check-in’s. We can’t leave comments. We can’t see when people are attending an event. We don’t see milestones. We have lost the ability to see lots on information in an easily readable format. What I now see is a great big box that takes up the whole screen on my phone telling me that RateBeer has noticed that i’m not following many breweries!!! That should not even be there.
What we asked Joe to do was to FIX the existing Latest Activity page, not replace it. It used to work fine until 2 or 3 months ago until a couple of bugs were introduced. I’m sure that fixing those would have been a simple task. We didn’t want a new page.
If RateBeer is to survive then it needs a site that engages users and encourages them to rate. The old page did that and the new page absolutely does not.
I’m sorry if you think that I and others have been rude to Joe, but i’m also sorry to see RateBeer hemorrhaging users and i’m sorry to see senior, long-standing admins walk away. I’m sorry and indeed angry when I put so much effort into the site to see it being undone by changes that take away functionality. I’m sorry when I add a new beer to the site that already has 3500 check-ins on Untappd. Some things need to be said. We were not asking for the Latest Activity page to be replaced and I feel that the two weeks that Joe spent on this would have been better used elsewhere.
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You still see rates, they’re just being rolled up over a longer period than they used to. Otherwise, it’s exactly the same, and it presumably will be the exact same once that roll up time is changed / made customisable (as I imagine will be done given the feedback on it).
I honestly didn’t notice my own rates weren’t on the feed (and I have no problem with that because I already know my own activity because I was there) but presumably this is something that could be added very easily. Same for check-ins and milestones and attending events. All things that could (and should) be added.
Telling you about new breweries to follow is exactly the sort of thing that engages users and encourage them to rate. Point out stuff around them that they didn’t know about - whether it be breweries, other users, beers or places - and try to get them to engage with it. I rated two places that the feed reminded me about that I never got round to rating for whatever reason.
You may not have asked for it but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t necessary. As Joe has made abundantly clear on these forums, the site was a mish-mash of different code that barely meshed together. That’s why it broke from changing small things in unrelated parts of the site. The whole site is being updated so that things are cohesive, and so a new feed is needed that is robust to minor changes elsewhere.
And for the record, I wasn’t really meaning you. Your post may have taken a sharp tone but it was feedback on how to improve things. Feedback on what people want improved is good, just posting to say the update is terrible and calling Joe an idiot seems unnecessary.
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Just so you all know, I’ve pulled the page temporarily so that other engineers can stabilize the environment. I’ll happily get to work as soon as I’m given the green light.
Yes, you still see peoples’s rates, but it’s not exactly the same. If a friend has been on a beer ticking trip to Amsterdam today it would be nice to see what he’s rated today and today only. Not what he rated two weeks ago. It’s also in that nasty little box that takes up way too much space and every box has a totally unnecessary header that takes up even more space. Why show me friends place ratings that took place 12 days ago? It’s not “Latest” activity. The old feed never did that.
Yes, all the missing things could be added back in time, but why take them away in the first place? It just pisses people off and heaven knows RateBeer has done that to its users so many times over the last year.
Telling me that i’m only following two breweries is fine, but don’t tell me every single time I click the latest activity feed. Put it in a separate “notifications page”. It’s not Latest Activity, neither is telling me i’m a master rater. That “Brewery Box” fills up most of the screen on my phone and I have to scroll past it every time. It’s annoying.
Yes, maybe the Latest Activity page needed some work as it wasn’t compatible with other parts of the site and maybe some of the recent issues were only introduced by other changes elsewhere. However, the format should not have been changed. Absolutly nobody wanted that. Rewrite the code to make it more stable and compatible by all means, but don’t change an already liked format.
I was in the Netherlands last week for the Borefts festival and when I met up with some friends one night in a bar, almost the first thing that was said was “Have you seen what they have they have done with the activity feed?”. Nobody there, absolutely nobody thought it was a positive move. In fact quite the opposite.
Three or four years ago at Borefts, I never had to add a beer because there were so many other power raters who would do it first. This year I spent half my time adding new beers. There was hardly anyone there rating on RateBeer anymore. Half the people on the “RateBeer table” were using Untappd and the situation worsens with each passing year.
This change to the Activity Feed was widely discussed this past weekend and when you destroy what was probably the most accessed page on the site for many users, the reaction will be predictable. We need to stop making these changes that nobody asks for because with every unwanted change that takes place, we seem to be alienating even more users. Nobody here wants to see RateBeer die, but slowly and surely it is and this change to the activity feed has accelerated that decline.
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This is more or less useless feed. Ok, it is totally useless. And I don’t know how to get rid off “no location found”. I assume that it is something for US users only (yes, I have local zip and city etc)
I think most people resolved this by going into the profile, then click Save…
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