Thanks for the mention and the kind words. I really appreciate it.

As far as requiring an account to rate sodas, there are a couple reasons. First, I’m secretly harvesting market data for both The Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo. Just kidding. hehe.

A big reason is the integrity of the data, meaning our ratings. Yes, this site is for fun, certainly, but I also want it to have some function and I want the ratings themselves to be respected as valid.

I want people who are looking for a good sugar free and caffeine free soda to be able to come and get a few good choices to check out. I want someone looking for a regular soda to be able to do the same. I want to do it myself.

I do not want our data and ratings to be treated as a joke because they will lose meaning and if the rating mean nothing, less people are going to want to bother. Who wants to waste their time rating sodas on a site where people are allowed to abuse the system? Not me, personally.

Because of this, we have a number of blocks in place to prevent abuse of the site. Requiring an account for rating is one of them and, in general, it makes things cleaner (from both a user perspective and a management perspective). For example, you can see all of the sodas that someone rated. It would be difficult or unreliable to attempt this without an account based system.

Another reason is the cool stuff that it allows us to do, such as the profile pages and image generation and maybe even more in the future.

Thanks again for the mention.