Sadly I have not been doing any development on Pubs Galore for a while, I have been too busy. Which is a real pity as we have had some excellent new contributors on the site to mention a few Graham Mason, Peter Ashworth and T Valtojos (but there have been many more and we appreciate you all) have all been contributing regularly since just appearing on the site, which is fantastic to see.
I have not really been reciprocating my end of the deal, but I hope to get some work going behind the scenes again soon. A lot of the work I have planned revolves around allowing the members more control over the listings, so that they can do address corrections and pub closures without having to send feedback to us. Hopefully this will speed up the process and allow users to be credited with all the behind the scenes corrections they are already doing. I also want to rewrite the whole review system as it is now very dated.
In this vein though it is interesting to wonder how far we may actually take it, we already have a lot of users who are great advocates for their area, Mike Hewitt has basically been responsible for bringing Whitby up to speed, the McGraw's (1, 2) whilst doing most of England have lavished a great deal of attention on London. I hope that one day the site allows members to take on more responsibility for their adopted areas and give it even more personality. A long way off, but it would be great if we can get the site there.
Monday, 22 September 2008
Monday, 8 September 2008
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.
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.
Monday, 1 September 2008
In the background
We had a regular contributor ask us this week why we had taken more than a week to approve some of their pictures and why we were rejecting so many of their pub contributions when they weren't being reported on postcode match.
They were actually different issues but both demonstrate that work goes on after every contribution to the site. Pictures at their most basic level do need approving, way back when we started the site anyone could post a picture and it would just appear, this didn't last for long as it turned out to be an open invite for people to contribute any old rubbish including a certain amount of porn. Approval was the first thing added, that at least meant we could stop the most obvious rubbish getting through. Next added was the members only aspects which also allows us to credit the user who contributed, by doing this it tends to detract users from doing things that are too silly, but also means that appropriate credit is given (both equally important).
Once all this was in place we put some basic checks in place to try and ensure that the images are not taken from other sites on the Internet. This has complicated the running of the site, we have had to remove a whole users contribution when it became apparent all of it was taken from different sites on the WWW. We have had to clarify with a user who was taking a great deal of images from bite, they confirmed that they had contributed them all to that site though (as there currently is no recognition there we couldn't instantly tell [apologies for the cattiness but this is the Pubs Galore blog]). Also there are judgement calls to be made, where a member has left a positive review of the pub, linked to the official site and posted a picture from that site but left no other contributions on our site we tend to assume they take a hand in the running of the pub and want us to reuse their image (hopefully we are generally right in that call).
Arguably where a person has put the image up on the Internet it will be fair use if we then put it on our site (and I can see how the Internet in general creates this perception), but to be honest this isn't an argument we want to have, and in any case if someone else is wrongly claiming credit for the photo it is not very fair. We have had a couple of threats of legal action relating to photos we have in good faith displayed, they have all been settled amicably with us immediately removing them. It is costly to both the person who has had the image stolen (at the least in terms of time, and in one instance a properly drafted letter) and to us, our reputation is affected and we have to take the time needed to handle any issue. That said there can be good reasons the images are reused, the photos may have been taken by the person who is submitting and they are also allowing us to display them.
Anyway where we spot that an image is being double posted we can approve it if we think it is someone responsible to the pub, contact the contributor to clarify the situation or reject it with an explanatory rejection reason (hoping the user will contact us and inform us if we are wrong). The decision we make on this is mainly driven by instinct. Also once we become aware that a poster is possibly using other sources we tend to take our time to check all their submissions to try and ensure it is not a pattern.
As to the pubs, again we have more tools available than the user to check the pubs, so we also search the area for pubs with similar names or addresses (similar to the user typing in the filters on the town pages that list all pubs). In this instance the user was very sensibly taking the pubs from the official site that slightly less sensibly had all the wrong postcodes (where we have more than 1 postcode for the same pub we check the Royal Mail web site to see which is correct). I think that we will probably have to improve the pub addition so that members can see all the information checks we have, the reason that we have not done it yet is that it is a fairly heavy duty process and could slow the site down if too many people played with it.
All fairly innocent stuff, but at least you know we really are looking at your contributions and it does take time, so we can't always do things as quickly as we like. Please be patient with us and just let us know when we get it wrong.
They were actually different issues but both demonstrate that work goes on after every contribution to the site. Pictures at their most basic level do need approving, way back when we started the site anyone could post a picture and it would just appear, this didn't last for long as it turned out to be an open invite for people to contribute any old rubbish including a certain amount of porn. Approval was the first thing added, that at least meant we could stop the most obvious rubbish getting through. Next added was the members only aspects which also allows us to credit the user who contributed, by doing this it tends to detract users from doing things that are too silly, but also means that appropriate credit is given (both equally important).
Once all this was in place we put some basic checks in place to try and ensure that the images are not taken from other sites on the Internet. This has complicated the running of the site, we have had to remove a whole users contribution when it became apparent all of it was taken from different sites on the WWW. We have had to clarify with a user who was taking a great deal of images from bite, they confirmed that they had contributed them all to that site though (as there currently is no recognition there we couldn't instantly tell [apologies for the cattiness but this is the Pubs Galore blog]). Also there are judgement calls to be made, where a member has left a positive review of the pub, linked to the official site and posted a picture from that site but left no other contributions on our site we tend to assume they take a hand in the running of the pub and want us to reuse their image (hopefully we are generally right in that call).
Arguably where a person has put the image up on the Internet it will be fair use if we then put it on our site (and I can see how the Internet in general creates this perception), but to be honest this isn't an argument we want to have, and in any case if someone else is wrongly claiming credit for the photo it is not very fair. We have had a couple of threats of legal action relating to photos we have in good faith displayed, they have all been settled amicably with us immediately removing them. It is costly to both the person who has had the image stolen (at the least in terms of time, and in one instance a properly drafted letter) and to us, our reputation is affected and we have to take the time needed to handle any issue. That said there can be good reasons the images are reused, the photos may have been taken by the person who is submitting and they are also allowing us to display them.
Anyway where we spot that an image is being double posted we can approve it if we think it is someone responsible to the pub, contact the contributor to clarify the situation or reject it with an explanatory rejection reason (hoping the user will contact us and inform us if we are wrong). The decision we make on this is mainly driven by instinct. Also once we become aware that a poster is possibly using other sources we tend to take our time to check all their submissions to try and ensure it is not a pattern.
As to the pubs, again we have more tools available than the user to check the pubs, so we also search the area for pubs with similar names or addresses (similar to the user typing in the filters on the town pages that list all pubs). In this instance the user was very sensibly taking the pubs from the official site that slightly less sensibly had all the wrong postcodes (where we have more than 1 postcode for the same pub we check the Royal Mail web site to see which is correct). I think that we will probably have to improve the pub addition so that members can see all the information checks we have, the reason that we have not done it yet is that it is a fairly heavy duty process and could slow the site down if too many people played with it.
All fairly innocent stuff, but at least you know we really are looking at your contributions and it does take time, so we can't always do things as quickly as we like. Please be patient with us and just let us know when we get it wrong.
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