New Rating System +/-

It's a joke. Is there a plan to go back and "fix" the How to Review a Beer article here?: http://www.beeradvocate.com/articles/637/ , specifically the What to look for section?

It would be much appreciated if we could, at the very least, get a backup of the broken out scores.

 

Not sure what happened there but I just wanted to add my 2 cents - I have to agree with other reviewers like UCLABrewN84, I will miss the nuances of having 5 separate ratings for appearance, aroma, taste, mouthfeel, and drinkability... and I have no idea how I'm ever going to settle on a single final number that places one beer over another - it's far too vague and out of context without the 5 ratings, plus working out my own calculation only serves to invalidate all my previous scores - if you're someone who has reviewed +1000 beers that's a lot of re-scoring to do!

Todd I noticed you mentioned that reviewers were going back and altering their numbers to get a final score, hell I've been guilty of that myself, if that is a main concern wouldn't having a new system that calculates the final number while you're entering your scores (i.e. before clicking 'save') solve that problem?

As for serving type that hasn't affected me because I've been writing that into my reviews from the get go however I can see how there will be plenty of disappointed reviewers out there.

Anyway as a faithful BA member for 3yrs I hope that you reconsider the change to the rating system.

 

I agree with what you said... mostly... however one area where the score is really useful is when you're looking up other reviewers profiles (the "more reviews by..." button) and you can click on "ratings" and see which beers are that reviewers favourites (or click it again and see which ones they hate), and the point I made in my last post it that the scores will mostly be arbitrary now as most people wont be bothered calculating the 5 different ratings and coming up with a proper score.

 

Man, I just got back into reviewing again after a bit of a hiatus, and what do I find? An overhauled system that once again diminishes the motivation to actually write a review. I know Todd has said that the new system somehow encourages reviews, but what it seems to encourage is a few words as notes, an afterthought for the too-slimmed-down numerical rating.

I've been on here for over five years and am approaching my 4,000th review. I loved the categorical breakdown, the old character requirement (just because you can skirt a situation doesn't mean the situation is bad to begin with), and the serving type notation. Were these things often ignored/abused/misused? Yup. And it has been annoying. That doesn't mean these things should be ditched so that BA can be more like Untappd or some other quick-rate garbage site/app/what-have-you. That means the users should be educated, well-thought-out reviews truly encouraged (let's actually highlight the reviews first, without a checkbox, or, y'know, employ a "Review This Beer!" button or something), and a system put in place to efficiently find/fix mistakes.

I understand the desire to streamline and to make running the site less of a hassle, but some of the changes over the past couple years have made it more of a drag to use, especially if you're actually using it as a consumers' research site, rather than a simple social networking opportunity. I've been mulling over just quitting reviewing on here for a while now, and these newest changes may have finally pushed me over that brink. It was a good run, I guess, but if I keep getting signs that my kind (the reviewing kind) isn't appreciated or even wanted, why should I continue to bother? Being the change I want to see has unfortunately not been a fruitful endeavor on my end...

 

I far prefer the old system and will continue to rate on those scales and simply include the scores and my weightings in my reviews. At least with the usefulness ranking we can sort reviews to still find the reviewers who actually take time to write some thing decent.

Btw, is there a way to sort your own reviews by most useful?

 

As far as I remember that was the old formula.

 

Really looking forward to reading why people can now justify how a beer looks like a 3.97 and not a 3.96 or 3.98.

 

I'm not a fan of this at all, especially not knowing what people actually thought of things like aroma and taste in reviews specifically. This place is becoming more and more like Untappd everyday.

 

I like it.

 

3 people so far accidentally hit the bottom option instead of the top.

^_^

 

Had some time to try it out and "sleep on it" since the announcement.

The thing is what is appealing about BeerAdvocate compared to other sites is the context of beers, and slowly context is being stripped from the site.

While I use the lists as guides at times, they have become more and more meaningless as quick single digit participation has thrown them into chaos at times. They are constantly changing. 10 people tick a style with there buds, and suddenly there is a new top 1,2,3 Tripel, Scotch Ale, whatever. It bounces around crazy because of this. This all started when they created hads.

What set this site aside was the context of why someone rated something the way they did. The lists are now going to be worse because of this, since it just encourages to quickly tag a beer.

Untappd already does this. So why be like them? In a sea of applications, and technical arms race you need to look at what you offer that makes you unique and different. Are you going to be chasing the next big trend, or are you going to stand out? Are you going to lead? or are you going to follow?

It's a tough call.

I can still do what I need to do in regards to this site, that total functionality isn't completely gone, but the context of why is. As a reviewer my context had less explanation when you look at it.

On a side note unless this has been fixed since yesterday, it's also a little buggy. When you chose precise, you can enter... nothing.. or not even a numerical value... or you could enter 98... There needs to be some front end validation I think on that to bulletproof it a bit.

 

A couple of questions and comments if you will:

1. If I chose to change the default ratings sorting to most recent (the new default is the usefulness), will that remain for more than just my current logged on session?
2. It seems that because of the default sorting, the "bros" scores are always at the top now. Is that just based on Karma? Not sure what makes their review more "useful" than any other user if there hasn't been any upvotes on the reviews yet.
3. Who is the user @BeerAdvocate ? I asked because I found it interesting that a local beer had a review from Jason, Todd AND beeradvocate, and I had previously assumed that the user beeradvocate was just either Jason or Todd. Seemed odd to have 3 reviews from 2 people?

 

Which is a very bad thing in my opinion. There were many reasons I used BeerAdvocate instead, and obviously I'm not the only one. But now those positive differences are eroding.

It seems the changes being made are for the lowest common denominator of user, instead of valuing the higher quality input. Like how Beer Karma doesn't reward the two most time-intensive and valuable user contributions to the site: full reviews of beers/places (instead of just ratings), and pictures of beers/places.

 

Incredibly well thought out and articulated. Voices pretty much most of the people who write the beer reviews concerns. Like you I will still keep on reviewing and doing my best to keep my numbers (I'll have to manually do the math) on par with how I've been doing them for years, but yes, this update does seem to favour/trend towards quick reviews/check offs as opposed to well thought out and constructed reviews.

It is also still quite buggy (as of last night anyways). I know my friend JLindros tried to review a beer last night (clicked and entered a number) and instead of it acting like Todd described in the update post he had to physically go in to his list of reviews to be able to actually review the beer.

Obviously things take time to get used to, but this isn't like when Drinkablity was changed to Overall, or .25 increments were added; this is a major, major change. Not being able to see anymore that say, I felt all the aspects of the beer EXCEPT taste was stellar, hence the grade it was given...that will take getting used to.

Also, can I bring attention to a possible issue with up voting/downvoting? Reviews getting downvoted simply due to being well below the rAvg (even if it is justified in the review).

 

And considering there were pages and pages of outraged comments and debate when some of those other changes were made, compared to the fact that so far only 40 some people searched out this thread to give feedback.

Sadly I think perhaps a large percentage of the active user base of reviewers has moved on or are less active, and a majority of the users now only rate and participate in the forums. Because if this change was made 3 years ago, this thread would be 25 pages long by now.

That, or everyone just ignores the Help sub-forum.

 

It's reviews that are in the Beer Advocate magazine.

I'm torn with this new rating system. On one hand, I actually really like being able to tweak the rating number by increments of .01 because, since I've reviewed over 1000 beers, I have big clusters of beers all with the same rating. So it's gonna be nice going back over all the ones in those clusters that I've had multiple times and being able to go "well I know I like beer A slightly better than beer B so let's tweak A up a notch and maybe tweak B down a notch." But this is just for my own personal nerdy obsession with sorting and categorization...However, since I love categorization, I'm obviously very sad to see the category breakdown be taken away (although I do realize that, in order to have the new ".01" system, you have to do away with the categories). I'm especially sad to see that I personally can't even go back and access the category scores from past reviews for my own personal reference which is all I really use the reviews system for. I don't review beers for the purpose of affecting their overall scores. I do it for my own personal record keeping so, if there were some way to send all users their category points for all their reviews and then in the future we can include the category breakdowns in the text of all reviews from here on out, I would feel this new rating system is perfect. Instead, if I lose all those scores forever, it's going to discourage me from examining the Look, Smell, Taste, Mouthfeel and Overall Impression individually since now it doesn't even affect the score. When I first started reviewing beers on this site, it was right before the "Hads" system was implemented and, while at first I thought it wasn't a good idea, I now think it's great to just be able to give a quick score. Then came the implementation of category scores having increments of .25. At the time I had 600-700 reviews under my belt and I went back through almost every single one of them to tweak the categories so it would be a more exact score. Now they don't even exist and I'm gonna be doing close to the same thing again with even more reviews only this time it won't be quite as tedious. My point is: When does this end? When will there not be a need to update the reviews system and we all agree on a perfect protocol? Is this it, or will we see another update in a year or so that negates the attributes of previous updates? I've held on strong to this site and love using its features but I would like to see the features settled on a final concept already.

 

Why? I don't see how these are connected.

Have the rating available to give .01 increments, and still leave the 5 category reviewing to .25 increments for each category. It still calculates the final score to two decimal places. Basically, they could have left reviewing alone, and just modified the scale for ratings.

 

I suck at writing reviews but definitely value the ones that are written. Seems like less and less of them and beer rating system is being devalued when people are just able to give a rating and no review.

 

Thanks. How old is the magazine?

 

Clearly, the vast majority of BAs who have cared enough to post on this forum are not fans of the new system. And my guess is that a majority of the active reviewers (as opposed to the tickers) are likely to feel the same way. Perhaps it would make sense to prompt any user who enters a new review with an opportunity to vote on the new system, as well. That way, a better sampling of the views of users who also review beers would become known.

I am not a fan of the useful/not useful concept and don't plan to use it as I have concerns that it may be counterproductive by driving away good reviewers and scaring off newbies. I also think that removing the minimum length is a mistake as I was attracted to BA initially by the quality of the beer reviews. If someone who is primarily a ticker jots down a sentence about a beer that makes this site too much like others where the reviews are just not that informative.

Frankly, I didn't think the reviewing system was broken or outdated and I have not seen much commentary that suggested that others held this view. I think a far bigger issue is that there are a lot of duplicate beer listings and a lot of retired beers are still listed as active and vice versa. Putting some effort into data integrity would do far more to enhance the value of this site than fixing something that I don't think many perceived as broken.