Updates: Top Rated Beers

As do you I pay the most attention to the beer's score within its style.

But I don't necessarily agree that whatever beers newly on the list that you are thinking of just aren't that great since our personal judgments shouldn't be the sole arbiter of what shows up on such a list.

Yes, a lot has changed since '07 but things also changed a lot between '02 and '07 so it could be argued that the longer time frame has the effect of giving both a longer perspective and allowing for a bit more recognition to those long successful beers that would otherwise be hidden from view by newer beers when people take the trouble to look at the Beers of Fame list. (Which a surprisingly large number of BA seem to never do or care much about.) I'd suggest this is especially the case here on this site since the rules and procedures for doing and collecting ratings have changed several times since '02 and the longer perspective offers at least some benefits in masking some of the negative effects of those changes.

So there's a trade off with each choice having both pros and cons. As I said, the shift from 10 to 15 years for Beers of Fame no longer bothers me since I see some merit to using the 15 year timeframe (especially after spending some time trying to puzzle through what the Baysian formula seems to accomplish).

In a similar case I agree with the decision to no longer have the n be automatically be 10 for many lists. I didn't care for the decision to use n =10 when it was first put in place for those lists and have always thought the n should be adjusted from style to style based in part based on the overall number of ratings within that style. So I like the change there to something much like it was before n became = 10. But that change will also result in dropping some beers off of some of the lists as well.

 

i've got no current opinion either way about 10 vs 15 years, but could the number at least be mentioned in a description, like it used to be? as it is now, people have no explanation of how the list is derived.

 

I think this idea might be something to really help the site improve in user traffic.

- Make getting Poo-Bah status obtainable by actually doing "x" number of full reviews of beers, breweries, places etc.
- Make a lot of points towards Poo-Bah obtained by those that add new beers and adding new places to the site

- decrease points gained for forum posting (too many people are only coming here to post on the the WBAYDN and New Beer Sunday forum threads and that shouldn't get you up to Poo Bah status quickly.

 

Would love to see a toggle to include "retired" beers—with beers that are only recently retired and therefore still "findable" it would be nice to have the option of seeing how they would rank.

 

Did the formulas for the ratings get changed again? Seems like the numbers in certain states changed a bunch in the past week or so.