Consolidate the duplicate individual Beer Camp beers

Please don't take this the wrong way, but how much time does that really take? I would imagine 15 minutes, maybe 30 at the most?

 

I understand. Thank you.

 

Could some of the new incoming duplicate be slowed down or eliminated by clearly documented instructions on proper format for new names? Things like should "barrel aged" be first or last, when should the brewery name be included in the beer name [a primary cause of duplicates, which has fooled me several times; big breweries often now have parallel lists of the same beer, some with brewery name prefixed, some without], how should series be handled [like beer camp; Beer Camp as prefix or suffix or suffix in parentheses?], when or if the style name should included as part of the name ("Fred's Firetruck Red Ale" or just "Fred's Firetruck". I'm guessing that the bros. now have a good idea about the most common sources for accidental duplicate additions and instructions like these could stall a majority of them.
The instructions would have to be instantly available to potential listers to be effective.
I can tell that some of the duplicates are just because of inattentiveness on the part of listers, but maybe this would stem the flood.

 

That is a good, understandable set of rules about listing beer, but my suggestion is more along the lines of how to construct the name of the beer when one enters it. My belief is that many duplicates are caused by poorly formed or hard to find names. An example would be a bottle with the label that says "Doug's Tripel" (and at the bottom) "Aged in White Stag Bourbon Barrels". The first person enters this as "White Stag Bourbon Barrel Aged Doug's Tripel", another more literal, does not see "Doug's" in the list and adds "Doug's Tripel (Bourbon Barrel Aged) or "Bourbon Barrel Aged Doug's Tripel". This seems to be common.
You DO have the instructions not to add the brewery name to the beer name, but that is ignored in a vast number of entries. I've personally tried to add a beer that did not appear to be in the list because I forgot to scroll down to see if it was under "Sierra Nevada name" instead of "name". Look at the Evil Twin listings for a very confusing example of this. That's why I suggested that these instructions be put in a very clear place, like on the first page of the listing form. I'll bet 90% of people do not drill down through the threads to find your quoted instructions before entering beer, and the remaining 10% (including me) forget what they read a year later when entering their next beer. If it was concise and on the listing form, it would be more easily noticed.
So I think the current instructions are clear on the general process of entering a new beer, but fall short on forming the names, which I think is the primary source of accidental new duplicates.
My instructions would agree with yours: NO brewery name in the beer name; plus I would encourage people to put modifiers like "barrel aged" and collaborations into parens at the end of the name (I recently suggested exactly that change to a Fort George beer and you did the update, to the benefit of everyone I think). Otherwise collaborations could (and will) be entered by any permutation of the collaborators at the start of the name, and most people are just looking for the name on the bottle. The Stone listings are full of duplicates for just this reason.
Time spent on preventing duplicates may be a better use of your time than what must be a very tedious process of merging them.
Thanks.

 

Great thanks!

 

I was actually going to post something about this, because for the past 2 weeks virtually every new review I've done for a beer there is a duplicate entry.

I am starting to wonder about this because it seems to have been excessive of late than it had been in the past. I am wondering if this has to do with the fact that you can now add a beer without reviewing it, thus making more people add redundant entries. Maybe also people are doing this with the phone app? Not sure on that angle just a theory.

Hopefully for Todd and the site admin's staff sake, their database is a bit normalized and doesn't have say everything slammed into one table to fix the updates, and making them do a lot of manual data updates. But getting control of this I think is something they want to do sooner than later.

It's tough, but do-able, and harder/easier depending on how they probably have things setup.

I've flagged a couple brews already for duplication. Sometimes it's a little tricky to tell, but lately it's been pretty obvious.

 

I think more people entering the beers through their phone, which with a small screen people have a harder time (or are lazier) scrolling through the list of existing beers, especially if it's a brewery with 100+ beers.

But I agree with above comments that it's mainly the "Brewery Name - Beer Name" vs. "Beer Name" that is the problem. If you look at Stone for example: 225 beers, and about 50 of them start with "Stone", but the rest do not.