RE MrBeerFans

[RayF]

What are these Jocko wars you speak of?

[poodie]

We were invaded by a spam artist named Jocko. He would create new user names just about as fast as we could ban the old name and block the IP. I swear it went on for 6 months.

[RickBeer]

If the goal was to shut it down, what would have made sense to me would have been to provide notice that it would become READ-ONLY on a certain date, with PM capabilities left open for another period (say 2 weeks, and another 2 weeks).

In general, it seems that most of Mr. Beer's changes come very quickly, and without a lot of thought to the consequences. Recently they added booster (yuch) to all the base refills when they launched their new website. However, at the same time, someone didn't forecast quantities very well and they then ran out of booster , leaving the Standard Refill page showing OUT OF STOCK for everything... If an Inventory person working for my company ran out of a basic item like that there would be big consequences.

What's really funny is that they are providing LME instead of booster IF you use a code that they put on the forum. Clearly could have changed the base refills to include FREE LME during the out of stock period.

The second oops was to not reprice all the recipes that included booster, so any recipe that includes it looks too expensive. All of this could have been completed before going live.

One has to remember that this is a 20 or so person company with under $10 million in revenue that sells like 250,000 kits a year, largely to retailers. This isn't a huge company with vast resources to get things done, and to Cooper's it's barely an apostrophe.

[Whamolagan]

First off, thank you prof for everything you did over there. Although I had moved on to AG brewing, I was, and am still willing to help a newb with the mr. beer. We all answered the same questions and helped out anyone in need. So when Josh speaks of the fact the we were not part of the MB community, he is wrong. I sure hope I did not offend anyone on the last day the site was open, especially poodie and prof. As saddened as I was, the generous people over here have been very welcoming and pleasant. I have friends that do use mr. beer, and I help them in every way I can. I give little classes at my house to people who feel overwhelmed. They get to use my ferm chamber and my conditioning fridge. They get to see the whole little process, and they gain confidence to go home and do it themselves.

[mashani]

Booster thing... Coopers has their own booster. Actually their own 2 types (one is like booster + DME). Probably corporate politics trying to switch Mr. Beer Booster to Coopers product behind the scenes turned into *&$*. Might not be inventory dudes fault at all.

[Frosty]

Whamo, exactly.. That's part of what I was driving at when I said we were kind of like ambassadors for their product. I know first hand how valuable positive word of mouth is to bring in customers, and keep the regulars interested. But they treated us as though we had zero value and tossed us out like a bag of moldy tangerines...

[The_Professor]

I found something that is interesting.

All the mods and admins were locked out when the announcement was made that the MrBeerFans forum would be closed. It was for security.

When the board was spammed on the last day, it went on for hours before anything was done, and then it continued.

From the Mr. Beer board in a post about being spammed...
http://community.mrbeer.com/topic/34128 ... ntry422384

I have removed the spammer's ability to post content, but we'll have to wait for Josh B to get back from vacation to completely ban the spammer as I don't have those permissions.

Apparently Josh B. holds the reigns really tight.

[Wilson]

I'm pretty po'd about the way it went down.
The MrBFans Crew know I've been pretty sick for the past year., and haven't been able to be as active as I was.
I got a message on Facebook from Dinger telling me they shut the site down and that we were welcome to come here.