Changes to Beer/Check-in Ratings

[Greg Fiumara]

Hey there,

I had a bit of a surprise when I read about the changes to ratings
yesterday, so I just want to make sure I have the correct
understanding of the implications from the change before I go changing
around a bunch of my own code and UI:

** The value of the "rating" key the client sends to "checkin/add" now
corresponds only to "response.checkin.rating_score" from
"checkin/view" and does not always equal
"response.checkin.beer.auth_rating" **

Is this correct? The blog post also states that that Untappd will now,
"calculate an average based on all of your ratings." Neat idea, but I
currently see that the value of "checkin/view"'s
"response.checkin.beer.auth_rating" always is set to 0. Is this the
spot where I should be looking for the new user-averaged rating, or is
this value not yet available in the API?

In addition, one suggestion I have would be to use the median of
non-zero ratings instead of the average. This way, the fractional
component is always 0.0 or 0.5. If you count unrated check-ins, your
value will be skewed lower. If you use an average, the possible
fractional components are greater, and outliers (light-struck bottles,
etc.) could potentially play too high of a role. Just my two cents.

And for my own clarification, what is the site-wide rating of a beer
based on now -- the average of site-wide check-in ratings, or the
seemingly more democratic average of user-averaged ratings?

Cheers, and congrats to Tim and Greg on the updated apps!
-Greg


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Greg Fiumara

[Greg Fiumara]

On Sat, Sep 13, 2014 at 9:36 AM, Greg Fiumara <gr...@gregfiumara.com> wrote:
> "response.checkin.beer.auth_rating" always is set to 0.

Please disregard this comment. As you might have guessed, I wasn't
making authenticated requests when I was testing.

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Greg Fiumara

[Greg Avola]

Hey Greg,

Thanks for your question, here are some of your answers:

The response frmo /checkin/add gives you OLD rating score (if applicable) and the new rating score (if applicable) for this check-in. Nothing has changed on this front. The difference is that your "new_score" that is retuned, may or may not be your actual overall rating for that beer.

When viewing the /checkin/view end point you will see the following data:

The "rating_score" is checkin rating score, and should be displayed as such when using this endpoint. The "beer.rating_score" is the authenticated users "average score for this beer of all their checkins".

We don't count ratings of 0 when doing averages. If you rate a beer a 0, it simply doesn't count at all. What our average does, is simply take a pure average of the the X number of times you rated a beer (since Dec 2013), and rounds them to the nearest half value, such as 1.5, or 2.0

The site-wide rating hasn't changed either - it's still the same methodology that we had in place before - every user gets 1 rating, but instead of having that rating be the same for every check-in - it's basically not an average of all their values they performed at the check-in level.

For example - I had Beer A, 25 times, and my pure average was a 4.3336, which would be a 4.0 on our scale. My "rating" for this beer would be a 4.0, and then would be what you see in the "beer.auth_rating", for that selected beer using my auth tokens. When the rating script runs, it uses that 4.0 to determine the weighted average of the beer globally.

I hope this makes more sense - but let me know if you have any follow up questions. 

Cheers!

Greg

On Sat, Sep 13, 2014 at 9:36 AM, Greg Fiumara <gr...@gregfiumara.com> wrote:

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Greg Fiumara

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Greg Avola

Co-Founder / CTO

Untappd

gr...@untappd.com

[Greg Fiumara]

On Sat, Sep 13, 2014 at 10:02 AM, Greg Avola <gr...@untappd.com> wrote:

I hope this makes more sense - but let me know if you have any follow up questions. 

This is all great info, thanks! To a certain extent, you haven't really removed a data point (beer ratings), you've added an additional data point (check-in ratings) that derives the existing data point (beer ratings). It's clicking now, thanks.

BTW: I just noticed the "beer_label_hd" key in your screenshot. Can't wait until that gets populated!

-Greg

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Greg Fiumara

[Greg Avola]

We have it for some beers - but not all. Right now it's only on checkin/view endpoint and is used for Facebook and Twitter shares, as they require a higher resolution image.

Greg

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