News, Updates & Announcements

Bug Fix For Adding Teas, And New Brand and Style Pages

We just detected and fixed a critical bug that was keeping users from adding teas, and not giving any sort of meaningful error message. Our logs showed that at least 50 users probably encountered this bug. We want to apologize to any users who had encountered the bug!

Hopefully, all users will now find that they can now add new teas to our database and immediately rate and review them, when they want to review a tea that is not already listed, as described in our January newsletter Users Can Now Directly Add New Teas.

New region and style pages:

On a positive note, we also redesigned the pages for each style of tea and each tea-producing region, in the format and spirit of our recent redesigns for the page for each brand of tea. If you have not yet explored the region section of our site, which highlights the different tea producing regions, and the relationship between climate, geography, and the flavor and qualities of the tea in each region, now would be a great time to do so.

We list many teas down to the level of Chinese provinces and even individual counties, Japanese prefectures, and states and districts in India, Sri Lanka, and other countries, and our level of detail has been growing a lot recently.

More links with Wikipedia, Wikicha, Teaviews, and official websites:

In our ongoing quest to create as useful a tea resource as possible, we have also linked the region pages to Wikipedia as well as to official government websites and/or travel portals, and the pages on each style of tea, we have also linked to Wikipedia, Wikicha, and, when possible, categories of related reviews on TeaViews, a tea reviewing site that is older than RateTea, and that has a team of reviewers, rather than being open to the general public.

So go and explore our site, and, if you were one of the users who encountered a bug before, please try adding teas again! And let us know what you think of the redesigns, and, of course, feel free to bug us if you encounter further bugs!

New Pages For Tea Brands: Search And Browse Teas Easily

We have launched a major redesign of the pages for each brand of tea on our website in order to make RateTea easier to explore. This redesign affects 300 pages on our site, and was launched Wednesday, February 15th, 2011, with some small follow-up changes and tweaks continued through today.

The new brand page contains many of the same features as before, but no longer has a full listing of the company's teas. Instead, you are pointed to the browse teas feature, a more powerful tool which can not only list a companies teas, but allow filtering by different properties like the teas' style, region, or whether the teas are loose-leaf, organic, or fair-trade certified.

What you will find:

• Easier-to-access links to the listings of each brand's teas. These include the browse teas link, a search box to allow you to quickly search all teas from a particular brand, and links to browse all teas from a given brand by region or by style.
• Online contact info for each brand or tea company: you will now see, when it exists, a link to the company's twitter and facebook pages, as well as the company's listing on Steepster, the other major tea-focused social networking website besides RateTea.
• Listings of the top five most-rated teas and highest-rated teas for each brand, when available. Currently, this information is available for the major brands of tea, and there is partial information available for a number of small companies. You can help us to gather more data by rating and reviewing more teas from the smaller companies.

The advantages of using RateTea to find teas:

While some tea companies list their teas by region and by type (what we call style), relatively few tea companies have their whole catalogue of tea cross-indexed and searchable by both style and region, and, to our knowledge, no company has as exhaustive a list of styles of tea and regions of tea as we do. Furthermore, different tea companies use different classification schemes, so if you are used to how one company categorizes their teas, you may find it hard to find similar teas on another company's website.

By using RateTea to look up teas, you can also gain the advantage of comparison shopping, quickly locating different companies selling similar teas, as well as learning more about the teas sold by the tea companies you already buy from. We hope that our new brand page will draw attention to these features and benefits, and make them easier to access and use.

Stay tuned for continuous improvements to the site in the future. And please let us know about how these features work for you, as well as if there are any features you would like us to add.

Users Can Now Directly Add New Teas

When we first launched, we did not allow users to directly add new teas to our database. This was inconvenient, as if you wanted to review a tea that was not listed, you had to wait for a site admin to add the tea, and we were often slow at responding to these suggestions. To address this issue, we have now made it so that our users can add teas directly to our database, and rate and review teas directly after adding them. This feature is only available to registered users, so if you wish to add teas, you will need to sign up for a free account if you have not already done so. To add new teas:

• Go to brands, locate the brand, and then go to the bottom of the page to find a link to add a new tea from that brand.
• There is now a link to add a new tea at the bottom of search results, when searching for teas using the search box.
• You can also go directly to the page for adding a new tea.
• If you work for a tea company, please read below.
• We still require site admins to add new brands. You can suggest these at the bottom of the brands page. You can, however, freely add new teas to brands with no teas listed.

Before you start adding teas, however, it is important to understand why we did not add this feature initially. We put a great deal of care into how teas on our site are classified. Each tea is listed by brand, style (the type of tea, how it is produced), and region of production. The style describes not just broad categories like black tea or green tea, but often, specific sub-varieties, such as sencha or Tie Guan Yin. Furthermore, we separate style from region; for example, teas in the style of Keemun are historically produced in Anhui, China, but are now produced in other provinces and even outside of China.

We ask that when you add new teas, you do your best to correctly classify them, and that you first search carefully to make sure that your tea is not already listed. Do not worry if you don't know everything about how to classify a tea; we have help documentation on the page to add a tea, and you can add comments if you are unsure about anything, and we will check each submission and fix any errors.

If you work for a tea company:

If you work for a tea company, our terms of use specify that you may not rate or review your company's teas. We would still like for you to add your teas, but we ask you not to use the tool intended for regular users, as we have a different tool so you can do this more easily.

Listing your teas will benefit your company with free visibility even if no one reviews your teas. We link directly from our page on each tea, to the product page for that tea on your website. Teas that you add will be listed under the various categories of your brand, and the styles and regions in which the tea is classified, and your tea will also be returned in searches. If you would like to list the teas sold by your company, please contact us and we will get your account set up to do so.