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Of course, you are right. But at some point, there are actual people involved. If the reason we canāt get them to allow RB to continue is simple nihilistic corporate decision making, thatās terrible.
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forgot how to blank post
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Well, it is was it is I guess. Iām surprised it lasted this long. Just a shame when it started to seem to be picking up again.
Met some great people here, hopefully we can still stay in touch. Not sure where Iām going yet, possibly Brewver but not quite sure.
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This is sad news.
@joet Iām curious, if mcberkoās efforts to acquire the site are unsuccessful, would you (personally, as a favour to the community) be able to at least provide us with a database dump before the site goes offline? Or is that something ABI have explicitly prohibited? Because if we have the database, those of us with the time and knowledge can redevelop a frontend ourselves - something which mcberko has already mentioned is planned anyway. This way there would be no permanent data loss.
Iād also like to ask what will happen to the ratebeer.com domain name. I suspect it still receives a hefty amount of traffic and Iād hate to see ABI simply let it expire, because it will inevitably end up in the hands of a domain squatter and will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to reacquire at that point. Worse yet, a bad actor might spin up a very similar looking interface and attempt to phish existing users login details.
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Well, there are all those shitty ABInBev ratings that will go bye-bye 
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Awwwwwwwww man!
This sucks
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It has. And likewise.
This place made me a bunch of lifelong friends, gave me something to do and direction with my passion, and taught me more than I can outline here.
All, never having rated one beer.
I really do owe RB quite a bit. 
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Enjoyed trading with you, Matt. 
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I am fairly certain that is the case.
@mcberko any chance us starting a gofundme would help? Would ABI take a little bit of money for RB + the funds necessary to keep the servers running for a year?
@solidfunk any chance some periodical is interested in this story?
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I see your post which are way too many for anyone that actually has an outside life or maybe you get buzzed fast and just start posting random garbage. Iāve came close a few times to actually say do you have an outside life or any friends? You just helped killing the most culturally significant beer rating website of all time, thatās as weak as your post are.
Come back at me with some more weak shit Iām gonna scroll past from now on. You bring this site down.
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Hoping we can format an official press release. Do we need help getting the news to more than just the few beer newspapers that still exist?
I recognize the possible futility of any campaign to save RateBeer, but it has meant too much to many of us to give up. @joet it would be very helpful if you could tell us some people that we could respectfully contact and ask them to consider selling to a Rbian. I think we deserve that. Stranger things have happened but not without us speaking up. I think the site has life in it yet, especially if weāre independent again.
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Hi, Iām @mik3y, longtime RB user, but lurker here. Iām the creator of Kegbot (2005) and founder of Taplist.io (~2019), so I guess you could say Iāve been doing ābeer techā quite a while.
First, I truly hope the campaign to divest and save RateBeer works, and it keeps operating. Because RateBeer should exist. I have something Iād like to share here for the first timeā¦
Our tragically failed integration
I started talking privately with Joe about working with RateBeer a few years ago. My reason for reaching out was originally simple: My product Taplist.io needed a great autocomplete database. I just wanted high quality data, with an API I could pay for if needed, so that as a beertech builder I could get back to building more important things. RateBeer was the obvious choice (because if you know my product, you know which other leading beer database will never partner with meā¦)
Joe was keen to help, but as we worked on it, we had serious technical problems with RateBeer API access. Expired SSL certs, 5xx errors. It seemed clear that it was going to be a huge, uphill battle for Joe to get resources internally to fix it. And what an anguishing position he was in.
Dang. I need this product. But at the same time, I also started thinking about the problem of free, open, and high quality beer data, and how even RateBeer wasnāt quite solving it. How could someone build something like this that lasts, resistant to the commercial pressures that seem to eventually vanquish everyone? Why should that other database have a lock on information?
So I funded and started designing something new: Hoptico.
The new idea: Hoptico
I wonāt repeat our manifesto, which tries to answer the obvious and fair skepticism you might have, except to say I think there is one majorly ambitious and unique goal that sets the idea apart: The product must eventually become an openly-governed 501(c)3 non-profit.
As youāre bound to find by trying a search (or looking at the crappy UX), itās still super, super early. But after a long incubation, work is really starting to accelerate. Weāre almost done shipping the main workflows for managing beverages. And industry partners are starting to tell me, āhey - we want this to existā.
If youāre interested, weāre designing in public in our forum, and a topic I just posted is a set of ideas for how Hoptico can support RateBeer users.
If our mission excites you, I cannot guarantee success, but I do guarantee a faithful, vigorous, and fun attempt! Please join in, Iād really love your help, feedback, hey even critique. Iāve maintained open source projects. I can take it 
I remember when the web was fun. I am not going to let the fun, free, helpful era of the internet die without a good fight. Cheers and thanks to RateBeer all these years, and good luck to all.
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I donāt think thereās a point in doing this. RBās hosting costs are exorbitant ($7K USD/month!) due to the ancient and inefficient code, the greedy search algorithm, and the costs of AWS. The legal fees that ABI would incur if they were to sell are huge. I donāt know an exact number but any sale like this requires many sign-offs, partner/shareholder meetings, and so forth, which would involve high-priced lawyers. Wouldnāt be surprised if legal fees would be $50K or more, but Iām speculating.
This is why I attempted to persuade them months ago when they were still planning on burning cash for the monthly hosting costs. They seemed to not know what they wanted to do, and kept equivocating about what sort of divestiture deal they were looking for. I am honestly not sure what it would take at this point. Maybe nothing short of $100Kās.
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I meanā¦ itās not entirely unimaginable that $100k would be crowdfundable.
And plenty of ways to do it.
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It goes both ways. On the one hand, AB doesnāt care about the money anyone can offer for RB. On the other hand, they donāt care about the money. Meaning, they might care more about perception in the beer community more than legal fees. As has been said, Rate Beer isnāt some sort of minor actor historically. It isnāt 2005 and craft vs. macro is a big thing. The market is complex now, partially due to companies like AB buying up craft breweries. However, for any strategy to work we need to know who to contact and only @joet can help us with that.
Everyone, regarding these forumsā¦
(I donāt want to detract from the original thread here but figured itās a good place to ask given the attention right now. Forum admins feel free to split off this post into a new thread if you see fit.)
While many of us have imported our ratings into Brewver either as a backup or anticipating a worst case scenario, itās been pointed out that after all these years they still do not have any kind of forum software set up and are making do with a Discord instead. Nothing wrong with Discord, but it doesnāt really work so well for a community like this. i.e. not being able to easily browse, categorise, and search threads etc.
Iām happy to set up a forum identical to what weāre using here on RB on one of my servers, since this forum software itself does NOT need much resources at all, unlike the eye watering figures for the RB main website that mcberko quoted above. Iām happy to absorb the minimal (I believe) costs for running it.
Some important and unfortunate caveats though:
- Weād all have to register again (no big deal but I know itās annoying)
- As I have no access to the database weād need to start from scratch - this is a big deal, however we have a little over a month in which you could copy and paste any important threads from these forums over to a potential new forum I set up for us.
- Weāve no access to the
ratebeer.comdomain name so weād need to pick a new one (any suggestions? I do own forums.beer already, so we can make use of that!)
I did look into what it takes to host this forum software and it seems fairly straightforward to me, knowing my own abilities. So Iām quietly confident about being able to run it smoothly.
So, is this something we are interested in or no? Feel free to simply ālikeā this post if you think itās a good idea and if thereās enough interest Iāll have it up by the weekend for us.
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