BrewAdvice: The Answers You Seek

Well this isn’t an official announcement, because I don’t know when they started the site.  Looks like late last year.

But BrewAdvice is a new style of website for the brewing community. On the site members and non-members alike can ask straight forward questions and get straightforward answers.  (For example:  What is primary fermentation?)   A question may be ‘answered’ several times by many people.  As the answers roll in, the original owner of the question can select the answer that best suited the question and it rises to the top.  In theory then, if you were to go to the site and search for a question you have, you might find it was already asked and then the “best” answer is highlighted right beneath it, along with all the other answers to follow.  The advantage there is that you don’t have to read through 5 pages of comments from many different posters to finally get to the answer.

The second unique aspect is that answers and get voted up and down by users.  Questions also get voted up and down.  The process of voting also helps to drive the most relevant/popular questions and answers to the top where they are easier to find.  I like the fact that if someone who doesn’t know an answer to a question accepts an equally bad answer, people can vote down that answer posting their own answer which gets voted up.  It helps validate an answer based on what common brewing knowledge is as more like minded people vote up a “correct” answer.

As usual you can also leave comments on posts if you don’t have substantial answer to contribute, but maybe an anecdotal fact to add.

The “fun” part of all this questioning, answering and voting is that it can contribute to a members/users reputation.  Reputation is a tracking system (similar to # of posts on a forum site) that somewhat indicates how active a member is on the forum.  You get reputation points for posting popular questions that get up voted, and you get points for having your answer to a question accepted as good.  You can also down vote people too.  The sum of all this reputation tracking is that you can feel more confident about someones reply that if they had 3000 posts alone.  Because reputation can be earned and lost, it directly reflects how active AND knowledgeable people are.

Right now the site is still new.  So the reputation data being populated is still probably pretty noisy and inaccurate.  There are a couple other cute aspects that I won’t get into now.  But if you like cruising other forums for home-brewing info, you may want to go check out the site.  I won’t tell you my user name here though.  Just because I don’t want any of my fans unfairly voting up my answers and comments….(kidding).

BREW ON!