End of Year Site Updates

Check out: Beer Activity/Status Updates

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First, I'd like to thank those of you who left feedback in the Last Rated/Active Column Added to Beer Lists and Proposed Updates to Top Rated Beer Lists threads (and the mod team in Discord). Lots of solid thoughts and ideas! And lots of crossover discussions, so I'll address updates for both in this thread.

Second, we haven't made any major updates like this since the before times. And a lot has changed since, and there's no need to get into all of that, but many of these updates are long overdue and the core goal is to help improve discoverability and usability for all site users and site visitors. I also tried to apply as much of your feedback as possible, as well as a few improvements of my own.

Beers:

• Active (on BeerAdvocate) = a beer that's been rated or added within the last two years.
• Inactive (on BeerAdvocate) = a beer that hasn't been rated in over two years or has been reported as discontinued. These beers can still be rated, but will remain inactive.
• Inactive and retired beers are now one and referred to as simply: inactive. Like retired beers, inactive beers aren't ranked and won't appear on top rated beer lists.
• We now tag any beer that hasn't been rated in over two years as inactive. Requires a mod edit to become active again, but only if the beer still in production.
• As always, if a beer is no longer in production (discontinued), please propose an edit so mods can tag it as inactive. And vice versa. We need your ongoing help. Thanks! (Caveat: If an inactive beer is tagged as active again, it must be recently rated or it'll be auto-tagged as inactive again.)
• Removed the "Availability" (year-round, rotating/seasonal, one-off) field. It's become irrelevant, overcomplicated, and inconsistently used for reasons already discussed.

Beer Styles Lists:

• (Beer) "Name" column is first and sorted alphabetically/diacritically again by default.
• Moved the "Last Active" column.

Brewery Lists:

• (Beer) "Name" column is first and sorted alphabetically/diacritically again by default.
• Moved the "Last Active" column.
  
• Removed "Retired" tab, replaced with "Inactive" tab (see General notes above).
• Last active dates for active beers under the "All" tab are now green.
• Added a "New" tab to highlight beers that were added under the brewery within the last 6 months.
• ICYMI: I added anchor links on the tabs to reduce scrolling.

Top Rated Lists:

• Only active beers are eligible to be ranked.
• Simplified the weighted ranking system. Basically, I brought it back to its original bayesian formula. Back in 2019, we tweaked it in anticipation of the app being launched, which would've no doubt resulted a ton more rating activity. But that didn't happen, ratings have declined during the pandemic, and the weighted ranking system has felt it since.
• No change to the minimum number of ratings (10) required to be ranked/given a BA Score, but there's going to be significant changes to the top lists once weighted rankings are updated due to reverting the bayesian formula.

Notes:

• All code changes are live.
• Rankings, top rated lists, and other stats haven't updated yet and will take some time to process.
• We'll be auto-deactivating a ton of inactive beers over the next 24 hours. Until then, some of these beers will appear as active still.
• Thanks for your patience.

That's it for now. Looking forward to letting these updates settle in, reviewing everything in the new year, and dropping some new lists (like Beers of Yore and Worst Beers in the World) in the very near future too.

In the meantime, please continue to drop your feedback here and report any bugs.

Thanks, everyone!

 

Thanks. Me too. We'll see what people think with the new weighted ranks kick in.

We have a massive upgrade on deck for next years, and the newest version of the forum supports reactions.

It's definitely not out the window, but we've got the the upgrade to work on first.

 

https://www.beeradvocate.com/community/threads/end-of-year-site-updates.664062/#post-7422722

 

I think those in favor of 5, will the happy with 10 using the original bayesian formula once the update occurs. But we'll see where things land...

 

Update: all beers that are considered Inactive under the new criteria have been processed. We're talking over 220,000 beers that haven't been rated in over two years. This included a lot of beers from closed breweries and beers that were discontinued long ago, but never updated on the site. Massive cleanup. Long overdue.

The system will continue to process new Inactive beers daily, and the mod team will continue to handle any reports for discontinued beers as needed.

 

Most people (maybe?) didn't want me to change the minimum from 10 to 5. It's still 10 and I clearly explained why we need to revert to the original bayesian formula.

 

Sure, and those who think that 10 is too low will get a kick out of this...

The minimum (from 2019 until this update) was basically dynamic. It was the average number of ratings across all beers with 10 or more ratings. Much higher than 10, but we applied it to any beer with 10 or more ratings. It was around 27 across all beers, and varied across style datasets. This would've been fine if rating activity landed where we anticipated, but given everything that I already explained (plus everything else that's changed), leaving it as is would make it impossible for smaller brewers to ever break the lists and get noticed. It was basically a mistake, broken, and increasingly becoming stagnant.

Now, smaller brewers will still have to compete with brewers who release hundreds of one-offs a year, as well as highly rated beers with hundreds/thousands of ratings, but if the beer is damn good, and enough people agree, it has a damn good chance of getting some national attention. We're back to the days when a highly rated beer with a lower number of ratings could bust into a list and disrupt things. I missed those days.

Anyway, we'll see where things land...