Welcome to our blog!
Nov 7th, 2007 by chris
Hi everybody and welcome to the new Beer In The Evening Blog!
As you know BITE was recently acquired by Neransk and we’re adding a bunch of new features to the site, starting with this blog.
We’re going to use this to keep you updated with changes to the site and also for reviews of drinks and other pub and bar related products. If you would like to see something on here, then let us know by contacting us.
We have integrated the blog into the site so that you can leave comments regarding the posts we make by using the same login and password as you already use on BITE - no need to register again, just simply login when adding a comment!
Upcoming features on the blog include drink, pub and book reviews as well as other assorted bits and bobs.
We hope you enjoy the blog and let us know your thoughts in the comments section below!
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Great.
A forum would be a good thing.
Great news, new features good to see that the site is alive again - any way I can win some beer?
Love the new look.
A forum would be brilliant.
I feel we are getting some action now.
Keep up the good work.
Another thought:
When considering changes to be made to the BITE facilities, might the following considerations be taken into account?
1) a “moderation trigger” in the comments field to detect over-use of unneccessary expletives and inappropriate language (while respecting freedom of speech of course) E.g. we don’t need to use the “f” word to say that we had to wait 45 mins for a meal, etc.
2) would users (subject to security/anti-spam, etc) once again be able to add pubs to the site and/or update the name or phone number of a pub?
Suggestions to prevent abuse of the ‘reviews’ and ‘ratings’ systems:-
1 No anonymous reviews, all must have the username shwon. I know it won’t stop people registering a new ID for some posts but it would help to prevent some of the more mindless posting;
2 No pub can be rated unless you post a review. This will help to prevent people rating a pub they’ve never seen, especially when a new pub enters the top 10 and the ’spoilers’ come in to rate it a ‘0′.
Regarding previous suggestions about abuse of reviews and ratings systems: I often visit a pub and give it a rating without a review, because I feel I don’t have any substantive comment beyond what’s already on the site here. I agree, though, that anonymous postings are quite problematic. Why not require a user to be logged in to make a comment, OR to provide a rating. A list of users and their ratings could then be displayed for a given establishment. This wouldn’t eliminate the unavoidable problem of shills and sock-puppets (multiple personalities just to pump up a rating, e.g. Fifty Five in Camden to name one apparent example in my opinion) but they would be more noticeable & thus easier to disregard. It may also be worth it to display some sort of review counter (User A has reviewed X pubs and left Y comments). Not that the most vigorous commenters necessarily command the most respect, but this would provide a rough indicator of the one-shot raters.
Also, I very much appreciate having the blog, but it’s just about impossible to read in Firefox (at least for me), where only a narrow band of the blog content is visible. Something seems to be broken with the style sheet. Fine in Internet Explorer but I’d rather not!
1 No anonymous comments !!!!
2 No ratings without a written reason for that rating
3 PLEASE add more pubs to your website - I’ve recommended over a dozen over the last few months which have never appeared.
Two suggestions for your main site…
1 In your “During the last month” bit where you mention new pubs listed, why not detail exactly which ones they are.
2 Why not have the “Random pub of the day” to be a different pub every day. With thousands of pubs on your records, Edwards Bar, Hammersmith comes around with monotonous regularity.
Hi there. Love the new look web site. A major improvement, a much more pleasant place to visit.
How about being able to see all reviews for a particular reviewer?
Keep up the good work.
Cheers,
Nick.
Absolutely agree that you must be logged and leave a comment to give a rating. Most of the pubs round my way are on about 20 users. A couple that found their way briefly into the top ten are in the 40s, suggesting about half are spoilers, making a nonsense of the entire thing.
I’d like to echo the sentiment of ‘mankybadger’ about being able to add more pubs to the site. I also posted several recommendations, for them to disappear into cyberspace. I became quite disillusioned for a while, as I’m sure many other BITE members did.
Would it be possible to issue new guidelines regarding the time scale between recommending a pub and it actually appearing on the site?
Is it worth recommending any new pubs at the moment, or is more time required?
Like the new look and feel of the site. Good luck.
In agreement with the sentiments above; also noted that reviews sometimes “vanish” on posting and, on many occasions albeit randomly, I have had to “copy” a review - particularly a long thought out one - in case it fails to post then “paste” it back into the input field. The “thank you for your comment” message often fails to appear on such occasions.
What you are doing with the site is great, I like the new style and colour scheme which is friendly on the eye.
Another thought that passed my mind today:
Remember on the old-style pub pages the functions and facilities were highlighted on coloured strips. I found them easier to read that way than black text on green background, but how about introducing standard symbols on the page (e.g. the [P] for car parking facilities, dining symbol for food served, etc) These could show in contrast against the background and be quite handy. Also one or two specialised attributes like “gay friendly” or “organic” could be introduced. These, of course, are only ideas, could be worth polling the usership though!
I would say BITE has been the best pub website around for a long time. Have checked out other ones which are never updated.
Though a lot of suggested pubs can take a while to come up, maybe this can be improved. Also a lot of pubs on the site are now closed or have changed names, and BITE does not update this much. Surely it would make sense to remove pubs which have closed
Anyway in general an excellent site