Bad reviews

In the past we have put a lot of work into trying to stop the site turning into a complaints web site. Things like calling reviews recommendations to try and give them a positive onus. We have begun to relax some of these ideas to try and get more reviews as we recognise that this is an area where our site is less productive.

Despite this we still require that users are members before they can leave a review, so we have both an e-mail address and an IP-address (Internet address). This means that if someone leaves a comment that leads to legal action they can be pursued (thankfully not something we have had to do yet).

We still get a lot of negative reviews, assuming they are true they should be considered valid reviews, so we do leave them as long as they are not obviously litigious. Despite this we do get a steady stream of complaints from landlords trying to get the reviews removed, these vary in quality. Highlights being an owner who spent a day phoning us promising legal action (he did succeed in getting the review and pub removed from the site), as I am sure you can imagine with this negotiation strategy I was heavily inclined to believe the reviewer.

More recently though we have had an owner contacting us who made an excellent case that his pub was not being the one reviewed as they would not have been serving food that night (a core point of the negative review). Now they may have been lying, but they were perfectly reasonable, and looking at the pub picture someone had left the story seemed to fit (information on the pub board out and general appearance). We immediately removed the review.

The point I want to make is that this site really isn't about negative reviews, we accept they are sometimes needed, but we would honestly prefer that you just sent a letter to the pub or owning pubco, especially if it is your only planned contribution to Pubs Galore. Pubs Galore is not here to try and get people out of pubs. If you are looking to leave one review why not make it about the pub you should have gone to as they know how to do things? And more importantly if you are going to post negative reviews make sure you get the pub right, this pub had pictures on it, it can't have been hard to look at them and realise you were posting to the wrong place? When you post to the wrong pub you potentially discredit the pub, how would you feel if someone walked up to you on the street and just called you a Wanker before wondering off with no recourse, I am sure it is no consolation if they mistook you for someone else. So in summary if you are going to post pointless rants, don't, and if you still do GET THE RIGHT PLACE!

We are interested in ideas for improving the review system, we would like to make it so that reviewers can post more than one review to a pub (allows for change of management) and that other members can comment on reviews. It has crossed my mind to just delete clearly rant reviews, but I don't think that is a solution. Or restrict reviews until 5 have been posted, but we would prefer that landlords have the ability to promote their pubs (although for decencies sake it is worth mentioning you have an interest in the place).

Let us know if you have any good ideas.