[Update: Nevermind on 2-4. The ratings are there through November 3rd. I expect them to be up publicly VERY SOON. Be patient!]

I think RateBeer will return with all of the reviews entered in before the new attacks…but just in case, here is a way to retrieve your ratings/reviews for now. With all the below Google searches, you must click the ‘Cached’ link for the search result.

1) First things first, as soon as the site comes back, follow these procedures to backup your RateBeer reviews. I mean it this time.

2) You can view ‘cached’ versions of your ratings pages by Googling “site:www.ratebeer.com view-user [user name]” without the quotes. Unfortunately, Google will spit out results at you randomly. Once you try that and see your user-ID, replace ‘view-user’ with ‘view-user-[YOUR ID]-1-5’ . What that will do is search for 50 ratings sorted by most recent date. Google may return an error but it works for the most part.

Try it again with a ‘2’ instead of a ‘1’ and it will give you your most recent ratings ’51-100′ and so forth. If you want to sort by the beer score instead, replace the last ‘5’ with ‘6’. If you want to sort by brewer, replace the last ‘5’ with ‘2.’ You have to make these changes on the Google search box, not in the URL bar in your browser. Here is an example of Bierkoning’s page.

3) Still with me? Note that you can’t actually see your reviews using this method, just your scores.
But by searching for a beer, you can see the five most recent reviews. So using the list that we got from (2) above, you can search the beers that you rated before shit hit the fan and should be able to see your reviews.

4) You can also view older versions of the RateBeer site (and peruse the forums) using the Wayback Machine. It’s confusing though because they don’t archive every single page on each date you see. So you may click a link from the latest archive in January of this year and it will take you back to a page archived in November or December of last year. It didn’t work too well in trying to retrieve old reviews though it is possible if you fiddle with it a lot…