0 voters
My āotherā is ease of rating. The advantage of RB ratings over ticks/ UnTappd is that you know what you experienced and why you liked it (and others can see that too). Make one way of doing that a more elaborate version of the current āselect these words to put in your reviewā (or wherever it is: as is the case more often than not these days, I canāt actually load the site, grrrrr) and sell RB as āas quick as a tick but youāll remember why you like itā.
I voted community and stats.
Community: RB has a huge advantage over UT (no forums) and BA (extremely US-centric) in that it has loads of users all across the world so we can get way more balanced and objective discussions going. This also lends itself to international trading.
Stats: main reason I joined RB was the stats for all the beers I was rating personally, I love to look at both my own stats and the top stats of beer styles, places, regional stuff etc. Itās interesting and gives motivation to try more of other styles or from a particular region for example.
Improved accuracy would be nice too but I suspect more admins need to be brought on board to help with this. By the sounds of it thereās a huge amount to keep on top of, especially in the bigger regions.
Another interesting insite into users minds, SO thanks for taking part. Ive found results really interesting
Bigger database. For most of new beers i find no other information but Untappedā¦
But for a bigger database i think we need more usersā¦
Does RB even have a forum dedicated to welcoming new members?
They got a No rating / No database policyā¦ I used to keep track and enter every new beers from my local brewers but I was told not to do so unless I rated themā¦
More badges
Wait, seriously? Who told you not to enter new beers?
On RateBeer? This isnāt the case at all. I often add beers I donāt have in my possession yet and they can be there for days or even weeks before being rated, in fact thereās a couple I added months ago still without ratings. No oneās ever discouraged me from adding beers if I havenāt got a rating to add.
I think a long time ago this used to be the case, as lots of one off festivals would be added before the festival, and no one would ever rate them and then they would never be seen again. But times are chnaged and lot of Beer that exist all year round dont get added, and we want a database that reflects whats out there
Ah ok that makes sense. The ones I add are always bottle/can releases usually from well known brewers or from local brewers that are at least distributed locally or planned to be at some point.
Howās the app doing? Seems thatās key.
Basic functionality.
Social elements other than forum posts.
my other is a nice enough overall experience that we brag to our friends about being on ratebeer, instead of telling our friends that we are on the myspace of beer sites.
now we have everyone over it would be nice to see some more votes
My Other is: ā¦define āMarket shareāā¦
I see features listed I would enjoy, but Iām already a user. What market are you trying to conquer? Beer nerds will have accounts in different places/services. Casually interested people will temporary use Untappd till they are bored. Make up your mind about who you want to attract and try to pin that down before you take steps to achieve that.
Thats a tricky one and there no one answer.
Really i meant see rate beer grow, thrive suceed.
I think RB is less relevant now than it was 10 yeras ago, Due to combo of Untappd and social media growth
I see lots of Bars promote Untappd but see none mention RB etc
Massive post incoming, which no one will readā¦
Hit the nail on the head, and I canāt see this ever changing now. To be fair to Untappd though they have pretty decent tools for bars to dynamically display their taplists and manage their venue in the app/website which users like. And, love them or hate them, some venues/breweries work with Untappd to do special badges which attracts people. Untappd also has photos, friend tagging etcā¦ so they have that whole āfun/socialā aspect nailed down that RB (and BA too) will never have unless they literally copied them (which would be very stupid and drive most of us away I expect).
Thereās also a more casual vibe around it, detailed tasting notes and scoring arenāt a thing there (which I kinda hate), itās just a simple rating and move on. Ratebeer is much more niche in that it caters to those of us who care more about ratings and less about social. Thereās some crossover of course (I use RB and UT equally) but I imagine a majority of us are in one of the two camps, for varying reasons. And I donāt think this is a problem, itās fine and both sites can and do co-exist and donāt necessarily ācompeteā with one another.
Promoting RB scores doesnāt really work in real life anyway. I never understood why RB highlights the percentile scores more than the weighted average. I never pay any attention to it, yet itās the most visible rating on a beerās page. A majority of great beers have a score of 97-100 or something like that. If youāre running a bar/bottleshop and only stocking such beers then everything will have such a similar score making it meaningless to customers. Literally everywhere else on RB uses the weighted average, but hardly anyone who isnāt a RB user knows this exists. Which of these is easier to understand for normal people: āthis beer has an avg rating of 4 stars on Untappdā or āthis beerās average score sits within the 97th percentile of beers sharing the same styleā
Then constantly improving the website and app in every single aspect like the ones you mentioned in the poll. All of it. @joet just needs to prioritise the most important stuff first. There are a few ongoing issues in several areas of the website that I see complaints about a lot.
Places needs an overhaul. The directory style listing is an inefficient way of finding places, mapping/filtering should be improved and made more prominent and the primary way to find places, and more flexible so non-US addresses donāt sometimes bug out and point to the middle of the ocean. This sort of issue was being discussed just yesterday in the UK forum.
Accented letters in beers and places and style names is still problematic.
And hereās a possibly contentious one - more admins should be brought on board, with varying permissions and/or regional restrictions if trust is an issue. It can sometimes take weeks for some corrections to take place and in many countries this is considered acceptable, yet if weāre striving for a more accurate and up to date database then I disagree. It should not take several weeks to verify an edit, which is sometimes as small as a typo. Yes, accuracy/quality is more important than quantity of edits, but if the queue of edits to verify is really that big that the current teams canāt keep up with them then it seems reasonable to me to look for more admins to assist where needed - there are plenty of us willing and able.
Forums/community/activity - this one is in progress obviously. I donāt know about others but these new forums certainly feel more active to me, regardless of the love/hate people have for it at the moment. Time will tell if weāll get more new members posting and rating beers though.
Stats - joet seems to be working on this. But yeah, we need MORE stats. All kinds of stuff. Many of the current stats tables are still stuck in the ancient website layout with broken links and such, these needs to be brought up to date. They need to be expanded to top 50 or 100. They need to show a userās own position if he is outside of the top, so he knows how far behind he is. The āCommunityā page on the RB site needs updating with links to ALL the stats tables, some of them are currently quite hard to find.
An example of something that would be complicated to change now but would be nice to see eventually is a better way of handling collaborative beers. The current naming method using slashes is fine (though I would prefer the standard āxā notation), but it would be nice to properly add collaborative brewers in a method similar to how we currently show contract/brewed for/by information, so that those collaborating would be clickable links on the beerās page. This would also have the benefit of us being able to see beers that brewery collaborated on but did not brew themselves when looking at their brewer page.
Iām sure I had thoughts on other stuff but thatās all for now. Apologies for the stupidly long post but if anyone agrees/disagrees with stuff Iāve said Iād love to here othersā thoughts.
I read it @LazyPyro! And I agree very much with the first part. The second part I donāt really have an oppinion, other than the part about the stats and top 50 - for example: So many beers show as āTop 50ā in their respective style, but the score is some .0X points below the acutal top 50 score. What is up with that?
Thanks for reading 
Yeah itās an odd bug Iāve noticed myself plenty of times when rating a beer, I see that little blue Top 50 badge next to it and Iām like āoooh Iāll check the Top 50 after rating this to see how many Iāve hadā only to find itās no longer there. I have a feeling that if a beer enters the top 50 and gets the little blue badge, itās then not removed if it falls out of the top 50. Not sure if intentional or a bug? If intentional then I think it needs to say āformer top 50ā or something so itās clear that it used to be top but has since fallen out of favour with raters.
2000- 2017 Ā© RateBeer, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Privacy Policy | Terms of Service
