Cancelling Membership (auto renewal)

Most of us lead busy lives and need something to work right without second guessing and jacking around with all of our settings every time we find a few hours to actually break away and brew. I've had to put brew weekends off to the following weekend just to try and iron things out.
Yeah...it's become a stupid, stupid game at this point. It honestly feels like being the target of a practical joke. I've kept thinking that there'll come a point when it actually gets settled into a routine again but it's not going to happen.
I'm working on getting my important recipes into the Brewday spreadsheet I worked up and when I get enough archived, I'm out. Enough, already.
 
I don't know if this is the right place or if I actually should say something, but anyway
I have just started brewing and looked at several options. I found the brew software here not very easy to understand, not intuitive. Mind you I hardly know anything about brewing yet, but thought it good to give a beginners view.
I have opted to go to brew target, which didn't take me long to understand.

Having said that, I find the forum section here one of the most friendly and helpful ones I have ever come across!
So please, anyone considering leaving: stay on the forum!!!!!
 
I'm gone too. Been working around bugs for months, never had my requests for simple bug fixes heard, changed my grain inventory to clear Cambros so I can see it since I can't trust your calculations, created my own recipe format since I never knew what kind of crazy printing problem you would throw at me next. So today I see I have 212 recipes listed instead of the 15 I've settled on. And, when deleting the extraneous stuff, you somehow deleted ones I wanted to keep (and were not checked). Used to love the site, something's off here now. Thanks for the memories.
 
Some of us have been beating this dead horse for months...I'm sensing a lot of "don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out".
 
Some of us have been beating this dead horse for months...I'm sensing a lot of "don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out".

Hi J A, I really promise you that’s not the case and we’re all incredibly unhappy with the state things have gotten into where you guys feel that way. We realize we really made some oversights on this release and we’re working as fast as we can to restore the UI to stability and fix all the reports we have coming in.

This is absolutely our fault though. We changed too many things at once, didn’t test long enough, I could go on.

I know we’ve had issues in the past too and we’ve also not learned from those things as we should have so a sorry won’t go too far here. But at least I want you guys to know that we do care and are working as hard as we’d can to make it right. And honestly are trying to learn from it at this point.

If some of you feel the need to move on, I understand, but please believe that we really value each of you and what you bring here especially to the community where you all help new Brewer’s and bring a great feeling here.

But if we can convince you to stay for at least a moment to send us reports of what you think needs to be fixed or is broken from this release I promise we’ll make it our top priority and we’d really appreciate it. Thanks guys and my apologies again for letting you down.
 
Hi J A, I really promise you that’s not the case and we’re all incredibly unhappy with the state things have gotten into where you guys feel that way. We realize we really made some oversights on this release and we’re working as fast as we can to restore the UI to stability and fix all the reports we have coming in.

This is absolutely our fault though. We changed too many things at once, didn’t test long enough, I could go on.

I know we’ve had issues in the past too and we’ve also not learned from those things as we should have so a sorry won’t go too far here. But at least I want you guys to know that we do care and are working as hard as we’d can to make it right. And honestly are trying to learn from it at this point.

If some of you feel the need to move on, I understand, but please believe that we really value each of you and what you bring here especially to the community where you all help new Brewer’s and bring a great feeling here.

But if we can convince you to stay for at least a moment to send us reports of what you think needs to be fixed or is broken from this release I promise we’ll make it our top priority and we’d really appreciate it. Thanks guys and my apologies again for letting you down.
Josh, it's not just this release. It's several releases. And it's things like this: I ask for a more elegant solution to late addition sugars, something practical for advanced homebrewing. I get a map of logged in devices. I get strike water volumes entered where they make no sense. I get monstrous avatars that interfere with printing. But I still can't get a good efficiency reading or ABV estimate when I add sugars to the fermentor. We get gee-whiz changes and the practical requests seem to go unnoticed. Stuff gets broken, things that worked before. I've been around a long time. I got my lifetime membership from Larry. The reason I signed up was the site was clean and it worked for the scenarios I used. And still, if I'm completely honest, for what I do the site works well. But I have to learn how to do it all over again each time. That's annoying and it feels amateurish.

I don't intend to leave and even if I move to different software or develop my own solution, I'll stay in the forums. I love the discussion and particularly the non-confrontational nature of the participants. I wish I could really share my homebrew with the members here. But guys, as you develop the professional features, remember your bread-and-butter.
 
Josh, it's not just this release. It's several releases. And it's things like this: I ask for a more elegant solution to late addition sugars, something practical for advanced homebrewing. I get a map of logged in devices. I get strike water volumes entered where they make no sense. I get monstrous avatars that interfere with printing. But I still can't get a good efficiency reading or ABV estimate when I add sugars to the fermentor. We get gee-whiz changes and the practical requests seem to go unnoticed. Stuff gets broken, things that worked before. I've been around a long time. I got my lifetime membership from Larry. The reason I signed up was the site was clean and it worked for the scenarios I used. And still, if I'm completely honest, for what I do the site works well. But I have to learn how to do it all over again each time. That's annoying and it feels amateurish.

I don't intend to leave and even if I move to different software or develop my own solution, I'll stay in the forums. I love the discussion and particularly the non-confrontational nature of the participants. I wish I could really share my homebrew with the members here. But guys, as you develop the professional features, remember your bread-and-butter.

Very well said Nosybear. I honestly can’t disagree with any of that. You’re absolutely right. It’s unacceptable. I really appreciate you taking the time to explain your stance. I’ll discuss the sugar additions with the developers today and see why we’ve let that slip. And we’re working on print fixes today that should go live soon. I know those are just examples of a larger methodology problem but they are things I can go try to make right immediately.

I’ve also started a discussion internally with all our contributors on improving QA which we clearly need to do a better job of. We’ll keep you all posted.

Thanks again for being so candid.
 
Maybe go back and fix all of the issues from the past two or three releases before working on anything new.
 
Maybe go back and fix all of the issues from the past two or three releases before working on anything new.

That's absolutely our plan.

What I'd love is to get ALL of the problems together in a list so that we can prioritize and get them assigned and fixed ASAP. Even if you've said it before, please share with us again so that we don't miss a thing.

I think the best way to do that is to start a new thread and ask for your input on what we need to add, what is not working as you would expect, anything extraneous that you hate, etc. It can be posted on the forum or sent to me directly via a message if you want to remain anonymous or just don't want to share it on the forum.

We really want to hear it all. https://www.brewersfriend.com/forum/threads/suggested-fixes-and-features.12138/
 
The reason I signed up was the site was clean and it worked for the scenarios I used. And still, if I'm completely honest, for what I do the site works well. But I have to learn how to do it all over again each time. That's annoying and it feels amateurish.
That's absolutely the shit, right there!!!!
I don't really prefer to keep working on fixing a site which I access and use for a fee. It's a lot like going for a "vacation" at your mother-in-law's house where you spend your time with a list of leaking faucets and pictures to hang and light fixtures to change out.
Two or three roll-outs ago the proper solution was to completely revert the site to the last place that everything worked and leave it the hell alone until everything that was proposed as a change or improvement was thoroughly vetted, tested and proven and then announced and explained and then posted as a beta version to prove its accuracy and, critically, it's actual usefulness.
There was a point when it all worked quite well and didn't have a lot of clutter. Those days are over and whatever is happening now will probably just keep happening.
The next time I brew, I'll use the spreadsheet I designed and maybe, if I have the extra time, run it through the BF calculator to see if it matches up. I'll try Bru'n Water and if I have time, I'll compare it to the BF water chemistry section to see what happens. The only thing I'll count on (maybe) is keeping notes in the Brew Log, though that's probably changed since the last time I figured out how to make all the new "features" work n a way that made sense and/or had any useful purpose.
No more free R and D time from me....I want to brew beer, not patch together a web site.
 
Thanks @Yooper
I posted some thoughts on water calcs, and water chemistry calcs in that thread.
 
What I'd love is to get ALL of the problems together in a list so that we can prioritize and get them assigned and fixed ASAP. Even if you've said it before, please share with us again so that we don't miss a thing.
It's absolutely, categorically impossible to do that when new problems are being added even before old ones are even taken care of. Every single time that there's been a round of changes the site has been disrupted. Not just because the curmudgeons don't like change but because the functionality went to hell and required user's time and energy to chase down the glitches.
I'm not a coder and I'm not a social media entrepreneur or business wiz, but it just doesn't take much to understand that if what you're doing is screwing things, STOP DOING IT!!!
 
So I just brewed my first beer with Brewfather today and its been the best experience I've had in a long time. No fuss, no muss. I selected my equipment from a list, input my tap water profile, and imported a recipe from here. Boom! Hit all targets 100% without the fudge factors I've been forced to implement here over the past year.

It seems to me ya'll have become so obsessed with perfecting theoretical algorithms you forgot about what's really important. Real world testing. That's too bad because I never had problems until you started mucking with things in the spring, and at the end of the day my dollars are going to follow the path of least resistance for a successful brewing experience.
 
Still love the forums though.
 
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Still love the forums though.

Ya, that's one aspect I don't like about the competition. I don't do Facebook, so I'm not sure how I'd address issues there. That said, I've been doing this since the Homebrew Digest was the only non-print resource available. Hell, I'm still using my Jack Schmidling Productions MaltMill from ~1992.
 
Still love the forums though.
It's consistently been one of the most positive, open and helpful communities I've ever run across and it's always been a pleasure to participate. Unfortunately, It feels like there's been less vitality there over the last few months as a result of all the distraction.
 
Glad I found this thread quickly after starting my first new recipe in a while. None of my calculated numbers made any sense and I hadn't made any changes to my setup. I found the layout confusing with tons of extra buttons. I thought I was losing my mind until I found this thread. I can echo a lot of the sentiments here. I haven't brewed a ton this summer so I figured I'd have to work through some of the layout/screen changes, but when my planned OG number made zero sense, I knew it was bigger than just a layout/feel change. I can deal with a new layout as long as I can create a recipe that makes sense, but when I can't trust my brewing numbers, I'll have to look elsewhere too. Now I wonder if my struggles with efficiency this year were on me, or if I was chasing new-fangled calculation theories...?
 
I used brewfather the other day, but I didn't actually hit my numbers. I had somehow entered my efficiency at 81.24, when it is more like 70. My WC IPA will just more of sessionable at a little better than 5%.
 

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