Official Northeast Merger Discussion Thread

if you're gonna merge two of the biggest regional forums on the site then at least give us the option to hide categories we don't care about. i imagine this new format will drive some people to check the site less frequently.

also, it's very funny that they didn't let anyone comment on all this merging at all. you know your idea is good when you turn comments off before anyone can respond.

 

It would have been a good idea to set up a poll with this thread to see how many BAs thought it was a good idea to implement this merger.

It sure seems that the vast majority of folks who have posted (so far) think it is a bad idea.

I read in threads that some folks intend to go away (or post less) because of this change. I would think the owners of BA would view this as a bad consequence.

Cheers!

 

On no planet does this board move fast enough to need to worry about 'losing' a thread you follow. At the most, the MOST, you may need to scroll to like the third page if you haven't checked the board in a week.

Is this merger dumb? Yes. Was anyone asking for it? No. Is it truly going to affect your experience here in any tangible way? Also no.

 

Also anyone that says they're not gonna post anymore because of these changes is absolutely a massive whiner so that's addition by subtraction anyhow.

 

Joking aside, this works out great specifically for me. I'm a New England native who currently lives across the river from DC. Most of the threads I check are the breweries I care about (and don't care about lol) in NE and the Mid-Atlantic. I still have to jump into the Southeast forum for VA stuff but this is less jumping around for me. Regardless of where I live, I have developed some rapport with a lot of you in these forums so I am kinda happy about this. The only inconvenience is that the URL I'd come to this site using was the New England forum URL.

As far as giving CT to the Mid-Atlantic, I am against it. Why would New England willingly give up Fox Farm?

 

Missed opportunity for a new forum name à la Moland Springs, could've been I-95 corridor or something like that.

 

With as inactive as the forums here are, it’s difficult for me to imagine a downside to this (and I’m often quick to criticize the changes made here). There’s such little activity that “threads people want to see” are still going to be on page 1 95% of the time... and mid-Atlantic posters seeing activity on the Hill thread and deciding to chime in is much more likely (that’s almost certainly the rationale behind this, and makes sense).

There will always be people announcing their departure when their beloved 2000s-style forums make the slightest updates, but I really, really doubt this is going to be the cause of any significant downturn in activity lol.

 

We're assholes in MA too, so I think our level of anal is up there as well.

Ha, this is fair.

Also to be fair, would the tap room culture have ever developed if New England IPAs didn't sky rocket craft beers' popularity?

I'm saying this as a very well known lagerboi in the New England forums. If the New England IPA helped me gain access to multiple to-style examples of Altbier, so be it (not technically a lager, but whatever).


One example of why I don't like this, there's a thread titled, "Places Where Cask Ale Are Regularly on Offer".

My first thought, "Oh man, I LOVE cask ale and rarely see it. I should click on this."

Second thought, "Nah, I won't bother. If there's cask ale available in Maryland this doesn't really help me."

 

Purely anecdotal, but based on my memory, participation and the number of the posts in general in the Mid-Atlantic forum has been steadily declining of the last 5 years, mainly since the switchover to the yearly threads.

People use to regularly create new threads about varied topics, now it's just a small handful of "popular brewery" threads, which to me personally are less interesting.

 

I don't know... That is a lot at stake- how about best 2/ 3?

 

And while Notch gets more traffic than most...seriously, they were outpacing everyone except Tree House in the old New England forum regarding views/replies.

There's quite a few threads on Beeradvocate, for the most part I check in a couple minutes here and there to see what's been replied to.

Personally it was just much easier to have all the New England stuff I care about in one spot I can check quickly. For example, I check the main page and see what's popped up. But I never click on "Beer Talk" and scroll through the pages to see what I've missed.

No time for that, I'm kind of an important rich guy.

@Todd any chance this can be modified or reverted back to the way it was? For most this seems to be at best a minor inconvenience, and at worst it could cause less traffic.

 

I don't see that effect, I see the opposite. In the last 5 or 10 years, tap lists and beer store shelves changed from having a wide variety of beer styles to like 50% of beers being (mostly mediocre) NE style IPAs. The availability of "classic" styles plummeted. It's helped a little bit that some of the hyped IPA breweries decided Pilsners were cool again, but it hasn't done enough to reverse the overall trend.

The explosion in the number of small breweries created more diversity in breweries available, but then most of those breweries decided the only beer that would sell is hazy IPAs, fruited kettle sours, and flavored stouts. Then the old guard of regional breweries (mostly the 1990's era "microbrewery" pioneers) chased the trends too, discontinuing old flagships and seasonal classics to churn out endless variations of IPAs. So the consumers ended up with less effective diversity.

 

I just noticed this the other day and was curious about why this was done. Then I read this thread:

https://www.beeradvocate.com/commun...orum-updates-its-like-a-big-group-hug.657816/

I guess the more the merrier? But for some reason my evolutionary tribal instinct to hate the outsiders is kicking in and I am starting to feel like maybe I need to fashion a spear and throw it at New York.....

 

Here's a thought I don't believe anyone has brought up- if traffic has been down in the individual NE and Mid-Atlantic groups, ad revenue would be down. More traffic directed to one area might equal more ad revenue. Maybe?

 

The positive effects of this merge are already evident. We’re seeing novel, interesting new conversations spring up like “Where’s my altbier? There’s too many NEIPAs on the shelf!” Beautiful.

 

Yeah I don't get this merger... there's a fair amount of "hyper local" discussion that happens in each region's forum that definitely doesn't apply to the whole Northeast. If anything this will just make this forum a cluster of threads to sift through, many of which don't apply to the area you live in. As a frequent reader of the New England forum, all of the breweries in that forum were places that I could visit fairly easily so I was interested in reading the discussions. The entire Northeast is a bit much...

I feel like BA is losing their touch with these changes. Especially now that they made trading limited to strictly beer. That's just stupid. The beer, whiskey and mead industries are so intertwined, especially when it comes to trading, that it really doesn't make any sense to limit them. I don't see any advantage to doing so?

EDIT: I guess since some breweries threads do apply to larger regions, a better system would be to have the threads be able to be tagged by the regions that apply to it, then you can sort by the tags that apply to you. Not sure if the platform allows for that.

 

Haha, we should totally be having each of those conversations separately but at the same time in our sub-regional threads!

 

Hey, aren't you at least happy I've stayed out of hating on the Tired Hands thread for probably a couple of years now? With all of their recent nonsense about "new" versions of their beers to try to re-invigorate their hype machine, it's been tempting.