Hi all,

This is a thread I have been desperate to get going for quite a while, and with a bit of chat going between 3 of us so far (hopefully more soon), now seems a good time to try it.

We are desperate to hear what you want this site to do. Our view is that for this site to be a success it needs the community (whatever that community might be) to want to come to the site and use it.

As a starter for 10 (taken out of context from this thread):
Quote Originally Posted by Historian
As far as BITE is concerned, i use it a lot. It has its issues, like PG. As i am a user i guess i can say what i feel about both, i have on BITE as well. I wont be offended if it is cut out! BITE suffers from a lack of administration, this site from lack of active users. If BITE carries on the way its going, i will leave reviews of pubs, but not bother with the forum. Its sad, as there are a lot of decent people that chat on the forum, but a few are spoiling it. There is no chat here to spoil, but you may notice that i do not leave rating scores here, just comments, as BITE shows how the rating system can be corrupted. You guys have shown in one thread that you are happy to get involved in chat etc, to the point that i can already abuse your lack of beer knowledge!
It raises some interesting points that I entirely agree with.

For me our site is the technically best pure pub website out there, with maps in particular being our stand out feature. Probably our worst feature being the review system, which whilst bad is still better than the majority of other pub web sites. Our real let down is the community (as in how we work together, not the individuals), and the way we interact with it on the site. Everyone we have contributing on the site is invaluable, including the landlords who review their pubs (although once again, please mention you are the landlord in the review). Sadly we are not getting everyone chatting well enough though.

BITE for instance though has a thriving community who for me are what makes their site.

Picking out one of the points in that post we are not great believers in ratings of pubs and it amuses me to see that they are requesting ratings out of 20 on the BITE forums. I think more ratings just makes it more confusing. If/when we go properly up the ratings route we will be trying to be original and not crank it up to 11.

In the background a lot of work goes on to maintain the site that never gets visible. As examples in the last week we have had a request from one of our members asking about what had gone wrong with the site as they could not view it. Whilst we think in this instance the computer they were using is up a particular creek without a paddle it did show us that if the computer had problems with one of the pages they would end up with 50+ alert boxes effectively locking up the browser (now removed). Another user asked what is wrong with the picture upload, we think they don't have Flash installed, so I am currently trying to make it so that you don't need Flash to contribute pictures. Also I am halfway through coding an interface on the page to allow members to mark pubs as closed or open as that is probably the thing we get requested most on feedback now.

Basically I would love to hear peoples suggestions of what we have right (just to make me feel better) and wrong so that we can improve it. We are always happy to hear suggestions and equally happy to explain our thinking on why we are doing things. I don't promise not to be defensive, but we are not interested in deleting or hiding anything as long as it is relevant and not too rude.