★ BeerAdvocate.com and How a Community Site Should be Operated

When you are operating a website that enables communication between users, there are a lot of very important considerations to make such as how much you provide to the user. Can they post publicly or is this a private person 2 person service? What sort of features do you build in to enable more connective elements between each user and how do you moderate the conversations and content? This is your site and you are responsible for it. Poor community management can lead to a complete implosion of the community and mass exudes’ of users. It’s also your responsibility to keep an eye on things because if illegal content is on your site, it may be the user’s content but it’s on your server so laws don’t always prosecute the uploader and you facilitating adult content, alcohol or other things illegal to minors would land you in jail.

It’s safe to say that management of a community is challenging and no one is going to say that the Alström brothers (Todd and Jason) who operate Beer Advocate have an easy task. Running a community is not turn-key and everyone knows that. The argument everyone is making since as far back as Google can tell is that the site is run poorly and the community is not moderated properly and it’s only a miracle that Beer Advocate attracts more users than it loses because there are people quitting BA each day.

I heard the horror stories about BA before joining. Friends who used the site warned me that the people on the forum were great and supportive but tread lightly because you can get banned for sneezing out of place. Another friend joked that BA is the only craft beer site on the web and the rest, well they are just a place for people to hang out who were banned from BA. Rate Beer, The Beer Spot and a few other Ning based communities are full of people “Banned from BA” who miss the old site and the people but realize that they can finally speak without the fear of refreshing to a 404 page.

With one Google search, I found hundreds of pages devoted to stories about users who were banned. There are 4 Twitter accounts that just report on people who were banned and why along with highly critical tweets about the brothers and how they run things. I posted a question to a Facebook beer group I’m on and 40 comments came in over an hour all with terribly hateful things about the Beer Advocate admins and it’s clear these former users are angry..very angry. Some of the banned users just went off-topic on a forum or posted too many times at once and said out loud that the site was too slow. Others said they did nothing like that but following saying something critical of the site via private “Beer mail” on BeerAdvocate.com, they were banned and told later that the admins monitor private messages too and take critical comments seriously.

The Beer Advocate community relates the Brothers and their small team of admins to that of the TSA. They’re here for your protection but if you try to sneak through with a water bottle or say anything about a plane crashing…even a whisper to your friend, expect to find yourself in a dark room receiving a full cavity search and maybe they’ll let you on the airplane or maybe they’ll just kick you out of the airport. Remember, they’re here for your protection. For some entertainment, here are some great Twitter accounts around the horrid community management of Beer Advocate by its admins:

• @beeradvocatesux
• @bannedonba
• @bawatch
• @occupyba
• @NotBeerAdvocate

For a community around 400,000 users (as of November, 2010), having Twitter accounts tracking bans is simply outrageous. It’s clearly a big problem and some of the feedback I found online is pretty bad. Maybe I should tell my story.

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Of note, I waited 2 weeks before writing this article. It’s important for things like this to set in before coming through with emotion and anger.

I joined Beer Advocate last year but used the site as a reference for beers I was thinking of buying. Right after the New Year, I finally decided to post a review and join the forums. It was fun and, for 25 days, I met some great people who have become friends in person and I’ve traded beers with users around the world and attended tasting events and received tips that have altered the way I buy, store and drink beer. It’s remarkable how much knowledge is on that forum. The Beer Advocate operators made this possible but the community is not them and they are not the community. If a better site came along, there’s a big potential for users to shift away from to the next community. What keeps a user on Beer Advocate? Their data. Data is an investment of time and time is the biggest investment any of us can make and it’s the most valuable thing to have that investment taken away without warning.

My time was wasted on Beer Advocate. The knowledge I acquired was valuable but the time I spent investing in the site with reviews, comments, posts and building friendships was taken away with one click of a mouse over something that any intern community manager right out of college would tell you is not worth being banned over.

This was not a slap on the wrist. This was a 12 hour complete IP ban where I couldn’t even login, I couldn’t access the site and my profile was gone and inaccessible from anyone. To view the forum, I had to setup a VPN in England for $10 and still I couldn’t login. For all I knew, my entire account was removed over a single comment on the forums.

See the image? This is what the Beer Advocate forums look like and that’s a threaded conversation:

Each reply to a post creates a shrinking thread. This is typical on message boards dating back to the 90s but the issue is that this window will get smaller and smaller until it no longer exists. I saw a thread with 20+ replies to it with each post making the window tinier. The last 5 replies above mine were joking about how small this was getting so I added something along the lines of, “This thread will to to a black hole if we keep posting to it. Awesome.” This was the first time I ever posted an off-topic comment on a thread and the thread was already de-railed and I was having some fun.

Soon after, my account was locked out and my home IP address was banned from accessing BeerAdvocate.com. I was certain that the account was gone forever. After setting up a VPN, I accessed the Google Cache page for “Site:BeerAdvocate.com/beer AdamJackson” which showed all pages in the beer reviews area that contained my name. At the time, I had posted about 70 reviews to the site and I copied all of my reviews before Google’s Cache updated and those reviews were gone forever. Some were written down but most were entered right on to the site.

After downloading my reviews, I waited for an email as to why my account was locked. I decided to give it 24 hours and soon, fellow BA members were emailing me directly asking what happened and why my account was locked. They didn’t even know. It was just gone. At hour 12, my account was restored magically and I received a few messages from those friends saying it was back. There was no message saying why I was banned but I didn’t expect one after reading this in their terms of service:

BeerAdvocate.com retains the right to delete user accounts, all associated content, or selective content, without notice or explanation, and may not be held liable for the loss of users or user content. The backup of intellectual property to a non-BeerAdvocate.com Service or personal media device is the sole responsibility of the user. 

A lot of large sites do this because it’s just easier to deal with bans. However, three guys run a site with half a million users. It’s my assumption that they’re not banning hundreds a day. A courtesy message would be nice. If that’s not possible, you should create an automated system that emails out with a reason code of why your account was locked. It’s simple to implement and there aren’t any other sites that don’t notify users with a slap on the wrist first, then a time out and then a ban but always notifying the user so they know why.

Beer Advocate is more than a forum so losing my account means losing actual reviews and private messages and personal content. Restricting my posting to the forum is one thing but locking the account out is completely beyond standard community practices. 1st and even 2nd time offenders are locked out of the area they abused and not the entire site.

I politely engaged BeerAdvocate on Twitter and here’s our conversation and you should read it bottom to top:

and finally:

I was asked to move on from the topic. No thanks. I did “move on” but by moving my account and reviews to another site that’s not Beer Advocate. You can now find me on Rate Beer where I’ve had open discussions with the admins in public and they’ve responded kindly and fairly to my feedback when I had questions.

I have some advice to the folks running Beer Advocate. You lucked out by banning me early on. You really did. Congrats on getting my $15 for a magazine subscription but you won’t be getting it again. You also won’t have the chance to ban me ever again. I have a new home that’s far more open and supportive of its users. If you had done me like you did this guy (quoted below), we’d have some problems:

Over the course of the next 7 and a half years or so I contributed well over 300 photographs, over 300 place reviews, over 2600 beer reviews,  probably in excess of 10000 posts, became a founding subscriber to the magazine and bought several pieces of merchandise.

Seven years of work to contribute thousands of reviews and posts and poof, his account is gone with zero explanation. To this day, no one has told him why his account was deleted. It’s your policy but you should be aware that you’re the #1 site for Beer culture in spite of the way you run things. The people and tools your site has are excellent but the community management is executed in the worst way and you’ll need to radically shift the way you do things because if a site comes along that does have better tools, your irrelevance will only be a matter of time. I don’t believe you have hate or distaste for your userbase but I do think you should hire a real community manager with real experience and not simply have Todd’s wife read through people’s private emails looking for enemies of the state. That’s not how you run things and it’s disappointing that I had to move to a site that has less features and a smaller community. Then again, with employees like this, it’s clear you all care nothing about the bread and butter. You can act and say what you want but just know, comments like this make your users feel disposable:

For now, I’ll be no part of the community. Your calling me a child and treating me like one was in itself childish. You’ve lost my respect.

http://beeradvocate.com/user/profile/AdamJackson/

Update: Beer Advocate has confirmed they read my article by removing my profile from their servers and banning me from accessing their website from my home Internet connection. The reason I didn’t delete my profile was to see how long it would take before they read the post and subsequently deleted my profile. At least they read my thoughts and that’s all I wanted. As for the account, there was no need to keep it around.