PG Historical: Phone numbers

I am just going to do a couple of historical posts about thinking behind some PG decisions, and will probably follow up with more, as we have a lot of new active members who may be wondering/frustrated at some of the features.

I noticed that aleandhearty is including the phone numbers on the pubs he is suggesting be added, and may be wondering why we are ignoring them.

When we first started the site we displayed all the phone numbers of the pubs, as has already been observed by a few of the new members some of the listings are several years out of date :o (and thank you all for your efforts to correct that).

As you might imagine with so much data a number of the phone numbers were way out of date and we used to get infrequent, but regular complaints from poor people who were regularly receiving calls on their residential lines due to our site.

Rather than deal with this particular hassle, and as I know it would p' me off we removed all the phone numbers.

At some point in the future we hope to make this part of an enhanced offering to publicans, so if they pay an annual fee they will be able to add their phone number. This serves the dual purpose of getting a little turnover into the site, and also as they are paying one would hope the phone numbers are current and correct.

For any publicans reading this, we are actually relatively relaxed if you want to chuck them in your reviews, although as I am sure you will appreciate, when we do start offering it as a paid service we will probably remove them.

would it by alright to add my mobile number into my review for the Navigation Inn in Birchills, as when i went it turned out to be singles night:cool:

Do you want my avatar?

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Originally Posted by The Archivist

would it by alright to add my mobile number into my review for the Navigation Inn in Birchills, as when i went it turned out to be singles night:cool:

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Grab a Granny Night Mr Arch ?:D

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Originally Posted by Conrad

I noticed that aleandhearty is including the phone numbers on the pubs he is suggesting be added, and may be wondering why we are ignoring them.

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Hi Conrad. Yes, I was wondering! Funnily enough I was going to raise it today, but now I needn't bother. Having heard it from your point of view, it makes sense.

(Interestingly, my local CAMRA mag said in their latest issue that many pubs wouldn't accept incoming calls anyway, when they were trying to verify phone numbers).

Personally I have never felt pub phone numbers to be too important, but I know from contacts we have had that others feel differently. I can see they would be useful for bookings.

As a compromise I keep on thinking I should put a search yell link on there which automatically takes you to yell with the town, and pub name present, then it is their problem if they don't have the number or it is wrong. It should be simple enough, I have just never really seen it as a priority.