This is helpful if you already know the name of a trader. I have a suggestion that would make the search function even more useful. Now that few BAs list the beers they have for trade, when I am looking for a particular beer I try to locate a trader that lives near that beer's brewery. While it would be ideal to be able to pinpoint traders by proximity to a particular brewery, I think to be able to search traders by state would be a huge help, particularly if each trader's home city was also listed. Any chance you could do something like that?
Yeah. The user search has existed in the sidebar since since the feedback system was created. I simply added it to the dashboard. Are you referring to the Gots (FT) page for each beer? Example: https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/trade/7971/?view=FT If so, click on "Location" in the first column and it'll do some basic sorting. I'd love to be able to do geo-filtering based on the user's location to a specific brewery, but we don't have the ability to do that right now.
Yes, I was referring to the Gots (FT) page - it seems whenever I look through that for a specific beer, most of the users listed haven't been on the site in a long time. I recognize the geo-location function would be complicated. That's why I just suggested to have the ability to search traders by state (and city, if available). Let's say I am looking for a beer from a Baltimore brewery and an ISO on the forums didn't get a reply. Being able to find current traders from Maryland so that I could reach out to them directly would be my next step. (I have actually found traders by geography by using other ways to search through ratings and forum posts but that is a time sink.)
We can only search users by state or country, but I'll give it some more thought. (I moved this into its own thread as it's not a dashboard feature.)
In a previous thread about trading ideas, I wrote in support of being able to throw out trade feelers in regional threads, and this is exactly why. If I'm interested in a particular brewery's release, I can target the relevant audience by being able to post in that brewery's regional thread. This is in the same spirit as @brentk56's idea, but it would be more straightforward than having to determine the location of each user and then PM them individually. I realize this could be annoying for people who don't trade, because it would add some trade-related clutter to regional pages. But it would certainly be helpful for traders (both for those ISO and for those FT or with access). For example, I live in MN and I think it would be cool if others could post in an MN regional thread saying that they were looking for the latest release from [Barrel Theory, Fair State, etc.] and offering [whatever].
We won’t be allowing this for reasons already discussed. There’s nothing stopping you from reaching out to users privately, but you run the risk of being reported for spam if they’re not traders or you abuse it. You also can’t use the feedback system or bad trader forum if the user isn’t a trader.
