What are the Alternatives?

Clearly I am not a power user.

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I also not a power user and if the top rater of taru sake isn’t powerful I don’t know what to tell you. :wink:

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I did receive it, afterall, seemed to be in a different file, not my inbox

I did not get the questionaire. I guess caring enough to post in this thread doesnt cut it. Its the power rating that counts.

I’ve learned two things while on here: being active in the forums only matters to a certain degree, and being active with under 1000 ratings leaves you nowhere.

The only reasons I frequent the forums are possible trades and a slight hint of camaraderie and easy banter between like-minded people. The spirit of the latter is often crushed by the way changes on here are communicated. For someone relatively new (2 1/2 years), this is even worse then the constant in-jokes and blank posting in the old forums. Imagine someone signing up here, finally making the transition to the forums - and then seeing this thread where folks who’ve been on here since forever talk about where else to go. Not a great incentive to become more engaged in the community.

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so are you saying that blank posting is bad? :open_mouth:

For someone who started to get a little active in the old forums, it was seriously off-putting to have to work through blank posts in literally any thread.

Oh, wait…is blank posting the secret handshake of the power user?

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I didn’t get one either. I don’t have the power!

Surely the best course of action is to act and feedback to people on the honest feedback given on here. What the fixes are, if it can’t be done with some reasons and what are the next steps.

Maybe like some sort of a project plan for 2018. Making improvements is great if they actually improve things but upsetting the customers/key stakeholders is not the wisest way!

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Happy to oblige :wink:

If you’re not a power user, you’re still important.

Sorry, I meant impotent.

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I think new people would come to the forums & see something has gone seriously wrong and after a year people are starting to lose faith that seemingly simple & frustrating problems (that no other website they visit suffer from) will be fixed any time soon. That during countless threads highlighting various issues, members like myself were told (sorry, “reassured”) that Joet has more important things to worry about.

Well, seems like frustrations like these have become the most important worry for Joet.

I really would hate it if AB-Inbev won this

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I got the survey, but at 200 rates per year I’m hardly a power user - wonder if there was some element of random sampling happening?

Not that it’s a great survey, with just 3 pretty basic questions and the options clearly focussed onto what the developers might feel like fixing one day and ignoring the site enhancements we’ve all asked for.

As with others, I used the “other” box heavily. I requested:

  1. Foreign character fix across the site
  2. More advance notice/ testing of possible site changes
  3. Better communication generally from the developers
  4. Adding extra colours to stat maps for 200, 500 and 1,000 rates (an easy enhancement, surely?)
  5. More country region splits
  6. Just more stats generally.

I’ve always kept a backup spreadsheet and would not move to Untapped as I hate the widespread inaccuracies on it and would miss the joy of colouring in stat maps (I don’t think they have those, no?). Also I do like the RB forums and the people on here. I’ll probably stick it out with RB no matter what, but will certainly let my premium membership lapse if Joet and the devt team don’t start listening to the users more and actually provide enhancements rather than just breaking and re-fixing existing functionality.

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Not sure if I’ve got a questionnaire or not. Ages ago I changed my email address in account settings. But the site still used my old email address.

This is something we all fully understand, and the plan is to build a platform for experts to share with an audience that doesn’t affect scores but also performs helpful interactions and is engaged as part of the community.

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I used the database to get email addresses but didn’t send to people who didn’t allow email communications. I sent to everyone and used surveymonkey so a small minority of IPs may have flagged the email as spam.

We got a lot of great feedback including some items and have people working on solutions now. I do have some questions I’ll be following up with people on so that we can be sure to nail down exactly what’s wrong.

We focused on power users because they have the most experience moving through the paths most critical to the platform and often are able to provide quality feedback. We got a great response rate and a lot of quality feedback. Thanks for your help! Back to work!

Cheers

Joe

After reading all this, I know that I know nothing.
At least it’s good for something.

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Someone may have already mentioned this, but Compile My Ratings does not give a .csv file anymore, it links to an html, which of course is useless because it’s just another page on the web site, right?

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the plan is to build a platform for experts to share with an audience that doesn’t affect scores but also performs helpful interactions and is engaged as part of the community.

What does that even mean.

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The thing about the website is that it’s a symptom not a cause. Because a thriving community, while it will gripe and complain about technical difficulties, will stick together for the community itself. (Each beer rating site pretty much sucks with UX.) Ratebeer had a great in-person community but not a strong online one. Now after striking the sheep with the ZX purchase, one of RB’s strengths has greatly dissipated. Untappd and Beer Advocate aren’t ahead because of their stats or their designs, they are ahead because their users share online. No one wants to come here and tick to an empty crowd - least of all one that finds that ridiculous video “Bloke” funny ( let alone all the blank posts). So leadership is to blame, but they do not share 100% of the burden. People made a website beholden to ticks and stats; now they are shocked that it did not hold up.

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