Longer reviews

Today we have removed the restriction on review size, so to all our verbose and artistic reviewers, go mad!

We have recently had a complaint about the size we allow our reviews to be and also have noticed that a number of our members are struggling to keep under the letter limit (mostly pub owners promoting their service).

To be honest I dismissed the complaint as it was a member writing an incidence report relating to dog behaviour in a pub, not really the most exciting stuff that can be discussed in a pub review.

The review/recommendation system is one of the weakest aspects of the Pubs Galore site, and one we need to try and improve dramatically. Until today reviewers were constrained to only 745 characters. Other limitations are that a reviewer can only post 1 review, and can't really respond to a review.

There are various reasons for all this, the 745 constraint basically comes down to me being a bit rubbish when we initially coded the site, I didn't do the reviews in the best way. There was a desire to try and keep reviews punchy to try and make them more usable. Also we were concerned that someone could try and vandalise a pub by trying to place War & Peace in the review and mess up the page. But being honest if someone would like to try and vandalise a pub a large review isn't a great way (and will be promptly deleted). In retrospect this was a bad decision as it means we are missing out on some excellent reviews from people who are willing to put a lot of effort in.

The constraining to 1 review was us being a little literal, after all, someone can surely only have 1 opinion on a pub? This failed to take into account how pubs evolve though, and so where a pub has improved or gone downhill and a regular would like to give an impression of this with multiple reviews they can't, which is a lost opportunity for the site.

As to the lack of replies this was slightly commercial, in that we thought it might encourage pubs a little if they could hold the right of reply on comments, also we wanted to avoid long repetitious reply arguments. Whilst the commercial aspect may still work we have moved a long way from that sort of approach which on reflection sadly borders on blackmail. And constraining the dialogue of opinions is also a big loss to the site.

All of these improvements are on the to do list and we will get to them. For now though we have removed the restriction on size, it was an easy change for us to do, and weight of momentum has finally led us to do it. We have a new member The Historian who has started doing a lot of reviews and it is obvious they were being stuffed by our word limit, which seemed like a big loss for the site, so we took it as the kick up the arse it is and quickly put this fix in so that the site can benefit from all the members who have wanted to add more content.

As ever thanks to all our contributors, and please let us know if there is any way we can improve the site, we do try and address everything, if a little slowly with the improvements at times. Also if you disagree with any of our attitude on reviews, let us know so that we can take it into account when we do rewrite that aspect of the web site.

Improved search

We have finally improved the search on the site. It has long been a weak link on the site, and is still not perfect, but is at least finally useful.

Previously if you wanted to find the Red Lion in Bristol you had to search for Red Lion and then filter by Bristol, Now you can just search for Red Lion, Bristol and the search will return all the matches. The new search will also do its best to correct spellings and the like, so if you are not sure if a pubs name has 's' on the end it will find it either way now. Also search on Postcode is enabled, so if you type a postcode into the search (make sure you include the space though) the search will return any matches we have at that postcode.

The old filters have been removed to save space on the screen, normally I don't like removing functionality, but the filters were a messy solution that has been solved by allowing people to search with the town and county names in the search.

As ever feel free to let us know how you are finding it, we do try and respond to all Feedback, this can either be done publicly her on this blog or on our forums, where anyone can add to your thoughts (the more people who tell us they need something the more likely we are to do it). Or more directly using the feedback system on the site.

For any developers out there, we are using the Sphinx search solution to provide our search. I cannot praise it enough, I found it really easy to set up, and where I had any issues there was generally a solution already on their forums. The results are easily tailored and infinitely superior to anything I have ever been able to provide using SQL solutions with a far smaller server usage footprint.