Pub sites

We are always interested to hear what people would like to see on the Pubs Galore site. And even more pleased when we see the site mentioned in a positive light (so please do that more often). We did notice ourselves mentioned in a topic on the CAMRA forums (dubiously under the title 'Bogus pub sites'), in general they have posted us in a positive light which is nice.

Anyway we couldn't resist getting involved, anything for a bit of self promotion. Sadly the topic did take a turn that could potentially turn nasty and rather than carry on with it on the forum there I thought I would reflect on the conversation it prompted between me and Dave here.

Just to be clear early on in this, the Pubs Galore website is on aggregate losing money, the advertising revenue in no way covers the cost of running or developing the site, it is at the moment a work of love rather than profit. We do hope it will make money one day as it feels like it should, but not at the expense of the users enjoyment, that is pointless. Any schemes we have for making money are based on improving the service to publicans, so additional services and a little control over their page (order of the pictures and the like). If done in the right way this could benefit the site as well, if a publican is paying for the service they are pre-incentivised to do things like keep their guest ales up to date.

Anyway, the suggestion in that thread seemed to be that only CAMRA could run an unbiased list of pubs. We don't really see this, CAMRA is about Real Ale not pubs, many pubs are orientated in different directions, as the recent rise of the Gastro pub demonstrates. An easy demonstration of this is munrobasher (the user on the forum making the argument) suggested that his site is run out of love for pubs. Taking a look at his site (http://www.whatpub.org) it restricts listings of pubs that do not sell real ales, hardly unbiased and exactly the same constraints as CAMRA should work under. Having moaned about his model, please do look at his site, it has some nice ideas and is clearly worked on by some people who care about sorting the details.

I think realistically as in most things a commercial web site will hold the advantages as it will have the money to work on and improve its service. There will always be a place for good fan sites though, for the moment we are in that category, and I hope we can continue to appeal to that crowd come what may.

All of which does lead me back to one of our continued questions however, what defines a pub? I am pretty confident it is not constrained by the fact it has to sell real ale, although that does improve a pub. I guess it is somewhere you can go sit in and order an alcoholic drink, sit there and drink it. This opens the door to a lot of restaurants as well however.

Let us know if there is anyway we can improve our coverage of pubs, and indeed if you have a good definition of what a pub is.