Beer Trading Feedback System (beta) Launched

After years of talking about it, and many of you joking about it, we're stoked to announce that our Beer Trading Feedback System is ready for public testing!

We looked at several out-of-the-box solutions, but opted to build our own for better integration, more flexibility and less bloat. We also took past feedback from members into consideration, and will continue to do so, however our main goal was to launch a simple system for the initial launch.

How It Works

• Trader A makes a request (the "Request Trade" button can be found on the member's beer trader page).
• Trader B gets the request > Accept or Deny.
• Accept > Rate (Good or Bad) and leave a little feedback (140 chars). Rating and feedback is applied immediately.
• Deny > We store it for later use or purging.
• A trade request can’t occur more than once per 7 days cycle with the same member.
• Max number of trade requests set to 10 per member, per 7 day cycle.

We dig this system as it adds legitimacy to the feedback. Both parties need to accept the trade before it happens, and by accepting the trade before shipping the threat of negative feedback will hopefully keep all parties accountable.

Good or Bad
The more we thought about it, the more we realized that it needs to be simple. At the end of the day, a trade is going to either meet expectations (good) or not (bad). Extras and whatnot are nice, but fall into a "good" rating and can be included in the feedback.

Use

• Don't make a trade request until both parties have agreed to trade.
• Don't ship until the other member has accepted the request.
• Wait until the trade is complete before leaving feedback.
• Issues? Try contacting the trader first, as negative feedback is taken seriously.

Rules

• Must be active for at least 30 days to use.
• Don't post fake/test requests.
• Abuse of the system will not be tolerated, and may result in permanent ban without warning.

Stats & New Pages
The following stats can be found on the member's beer trading page.

• Trades: number of trades (where the member left feedback)
• Good Feedback: similar to eBay; (good / good + bad) * 100 and rounded; number good/bad for this percentage are based on unique trading partners.
• Good Trades
• Bad Trades
• Unique Trade Partners
• Pending Trades: one or both have yet to accept or leave feedback.

We've also added a main beer trading page that'll expand over time, as well as individual beer trading pages for members which are accessible from profile pages and related beer trading pages.

Bad Trader List
Started in 2010, the list was maintained by a couple of BA members over the years based on input from the community. We've imported the 140 odd reports as follows:

• For each report, we applied a Bad rating to those who were reported.
• Those who filed the reports got credit for the trade, but no rating.
• We didn’t import the notes, but rather stated that the rating was imported from the old bad trader list.

(I also applied this to the past 2 bad trader threads.)

To-Dos

• Reporting system for abuse, mistakes, etc.
• Update rules.
• Auto-close of trades if one or more parties hasn’t provided feedback in xx days.
• Figure out what to do with Denied trade requests.
• Work on the Good & Bad lists.
• Add member beer trading stats to Wants/Gots pages.
• Misc optimizations and layout tweaks.
• Beer Trading 101 page.

Considering

• Creating a joinable Beer Trading group, which would identify users as actively trading. We could then adjust the Wants/Gots pages accordingly, plus much more.
• Tagging a forum thread (optional) to a trade.
• Allowing editable feedback.
• Quick reference lists.
  
• Extended stats and placement of stats.
• Hooking actions into Alerts.
• BeerAdvocate mobile support.

That's it for now. We hope you enjoy the new system and look forward to your feedback.

http://beeradvocate.com/trading/

http://beeradvocate.com/community/threads/feedback-beer-trading-feedback-system.127710/

In the meantime, I'm done with coding for at least a day. It's time for a beer.

Cheers!