Re: Lew Bryson: What We "Owe" the Industry (re: BeerAdvocate magazine)

This week industry folk have been forwarding us posts from the Brewers

>Association Forum...

And you're forwarding crap here. Give it a rest, dude. We know it's just spamadvertising for Your Lame Website.

Reply to
Joel
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I've seen they are printing a free magazine to compete with Ale Street News and the regionals. So these are articles from the magazine rather than the website.

Tom W

Reply to
Tom Wolper

It's not free- IIRC they offered it for $20 a year pre-publication and now it's $30 w/gift

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Apparently they send bundles of promotional copies to some retailers, which are probably the ones you see for free (much to the annoyance of some subscribers). Some retailers have reportedly been selling the free copies.

However, I don't believe these spam-ish articles are from the BA magazine. The reviews can, however, be found here

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and seem to be mostly from a general interest Boston area publication, Boston's Weekly Dig.

This Lew Bryson article just comes from the website.

Reply to
CurtMudgeon

Beer related material is crap? Dang, I just don't understand this hostility!

Reply to
Bill Becker

If you'd been around here half a dozen years ago or so, you would. When the Alstroms decided to start up their Beer Advocate thing, they started off with an email newsletter. One of the ways they got their mailing list was to grab the addresses of regular rfdb and alt.beer posters and start sending them the newsletter, unsolicited. When asked to stop doing so by several people, instead of being men about it and saying "sorry, we thought you'd be interested but we shouldn't have sent this to you without asking, and we'll take you off our lists," they kept up with sending people their newsletter and made multiple excuses about how they weren't the ones responsible that several of us who asked to be removed kept getting their newsletter.

To some of us, their origin is in part from spam. Add in the fact that all they really do here is drive-by post, and then whine once or twice a year about how usenet is dead, and many of us are suspect of their approach.

They do run a fine website; I use it from time to time if I'm traveling and curious about places I may want to check out. They have, from what friends have told me, done a good job with the beer festivals they run. I have no problems whatsoever with their running a website, or that it's popular. I do have some issues with how they do things in these particular two newsgroups, and have done them historically.

This also happened during a period where a multi-year troll account was uncovered - somebody that was deeply hostile to many people here, including threats of violence that extended to phone calls to certain members. There was also a rash of people getting signed up for a lot of newsletters following disagreements with people in the newsgroups. The Alstroms were in no way responsible for the troll account and chaos that caused, but what they did WRT their newsletter and their lack of a simple "oops, we shouldn't have done that, we're sorry" just contributed to a lot of mistrust at the time.

That's where the "hostility" you see comes from. It's pretty much ancient history as far as I'm concerned, and I pretty much ignore what comes from the Alstroms on these two newsgroups, and my only issue is people who simply post stuff from other sources and don't actually contribute to discussion. I've had this issue with other posters in the past, so for me, it's hardly an Alstrom thing. Fortunately, it's easy to ignore.

But all the nonesense from back then was targeted at certain people quite strongly, and if there are people who still have issues with things all these years later, I can't say that I blame them.

As always, things are much more complex than they initially appear.

-Steve

Reply to
Steve Jackson

Exactly. They're @$$h0les, and are just using this group to sell their website. We don't need them, nor want them.

Reply to
Joel

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