What's Going On

[Conrad]

I think some of my recent pronouncements have caused a few waves, which I should have appreciated would happen and that I haven't kept people as aware of the state of play as I should have done.

Here is my perspective on what my involvement is in PuG. Behind the scenes it is an extremely complex site and a literal bastard with technology bolted together from multiple generations. I am the one who did all this bolting with little involvement from others, Dave for instance would have a huge struggle on his hands to make a significant change to the system. So whatever my feelings, if the site is to stay up to date and address some of the sillier things like moving pictures around, I need to be involved.

Also to avoid litigation someone needs to keep an eye out, particularly on the forums and our feedback systems to try and ensure we don't get sued and have to pay whatever legal fees ensue. Whilst my involvement in that could be avoided it will still be necessary at various points.

Currently we are forking out a couple of hundred pounds a month to keep the site running(1), this is not an issue for us we are aware of it and it is a decision we made, however the site is never going to make any money. I don't believe in charging contributors, and that is not a model I ever anticipate taking. We could charge publicans but a quick look at the sums shows that it is unlikely to ever make money of the level that makes work worthwhile(2). Advertising is a key plank for web sites, BITE is currently top of Google search and we believe earns a good sum from advertising, if we were in top spot it would definitely make the site profitable (although would not pay a salary) but it would not earn as much as BITE unless we threw as many adverts at the user as they do, which again we do not intend to ever do, also we believe the landscape is changing and being top of Google will be less of a measure of success in years to come. So a pretty dramatic business idea is needed to make this worthwhile, and once that idea has happened whatever work it entails is needed as a lead in time. So for us this site is a hobby site, it is not a business, and if anything it costs us, even if that is just the time.

Now to get more personal about it, for personal reasons I barely drink these days, and whilst this hasn't stopped me visiting pubs, it is just socially and to be with friends, so I will stick to a few good pubs without the passion that many on here have. So honestly I don't share the interest the rest of the forum has. The guts of the site and practicalities excite me and in some respects I love chatting about how to get the site working as well as possible - so for instance the areas whilst being an immense source of frustration do give me a warm feeling to see how they are now embraced and not really chatted about. My interactions with the site however are to deal with the feedback received through the feedback button on the site. These are frequently like the forums and containing things like:

query: i am writing to inform you about the 'review' left on some pub page on 11th July 2011 by some person . . . . it was first posted on Beer in the Evening's site on Feb 2009! The pub itself does not have the same staff/management or even the same drinks 3 years on as in this review. i think that this review should be taken off of the pubs page or stated that the visit was made 3 years ago.

Please could you email me back with a response.

Which is fine, slightly less fine is:

facebook: Two women, one who booked her wedding with us and her friend who resided with us, have posted onto this site and slandered us and our business. Every piece written is a lie and potentially dangerous to our business that we've been runniing for three years without complaint. I complained to Facebook about the posting on someone's wall and it has now been removed however, I still find it on here. We are mortified. The only reason we can think of for them doing this is because one of them tried to get out of paying for the room on her second night and the bride, someone underpaid me £200 for food I supplied, at a very high standard, which I did eventually get from her and her husband someone else. If this slander is not removed from this site we will have no other option than to take the matter further. Please reply as soon as possible, letting me know what is going to be done.
Sincerely
Another person (Landlady)

So a first contact and threat of litigation, that pub is now removed, if they are willing to litigate on first contact then I am afraid we are not in a position to argue the point, far easier to not be in the firing line. Another joyous piece of feedback:

comment: A certain Well respected reviewer is currently submitting reviews of pubs in a way I disagree with

I think this should be disallowed as it makes the site look a bit amateurish and may discourage potential new users.

Regards

Another well respected reviewer

We have actually had instances where 2 respected contributors were sending what I would only describe as bitchy comments to us about each other, neither knew the other was doing it (as far as I know). Whilst on the surface some of this is funny, for me it is pretty much the only interactions I have with the site and I do my best to reply to them all. Honestly it is tiring and far too one sided. However whilst I find the site tiresome, its members are a great source of joy, we have done something that others enjoy and ultimately it is worth it, that said I hope you will understand why at times I lose the ability to find the funny side of anything.

Anyway, that is where I am at and hopefully everyone will have the perspective they need. As a final note, it is human nature to speculate and want to help. Please don't speculate publically on any of the people or places in my examples above (they may not even be on the forum), it is not fair on those involved, and the examples are just the tip of an iceberg that is much bigger than it should be, so it is far too likely what you guess will be true of another example I could have provided anyway. As to the help, clearly we are still only telling part of the story we have a business and PuG will touch on other parts that we may not wish to talk about, so whilst I appreciate all offers and will read them, please accept we are not going to reply, and this is part of the reason we are reticent to publish too much information. So for instance whilst it would be nice to delegate answering feedback, we as a company could end up liable for an accidental misspoken word. Equally allowing too much help on the main site or forum could open up everyone's email addresses to the helper, and whilst we may trust them it is still not allowed to someone not employed by our business.

Thanks for your patience, and I hope this works towards answering peoples natural curiosity.

Conrad

1) Yes it is stupid to be paying for something with no income. When the site was started we put it on a server that was running an extremely profitable product, so PuG cost nothing to run and allowed us to have fun and experiment in building a site around pubs, something that we both enjoyed. The other product has now gone away and the servers are surplus to requirement, thus the full cost of the servers is now Pubs Galore's burden. Sadly moving servers would not save money due to the complexity of the site it has some special requirements, so things like search and picture upload would break if we moved it to a simpler setup. Removing one of the servers would basically make the cost balance 0, but would mean we lose backups and a development server, long term this is likely to mean the site suffers but is an option that means the site is very unlikely to go away.

2) We currently have 50,000+ open pubs on the system, if each paid us a pound that would pay for 1 reasonable salary and overheads, BITE charges £120/year and at best guess has 50 pubs forking that despite being the most prominent pub web site. A quick play with a slide rule and the differential equation should give you an expression of how faulty that proposition works out.

[Quinno]

Thanks Conrad, that was an interesting read. And perhaps a number of us can now appreciate that the site is a labour of love!

One thing though:

"a first contact and threat of litigation, that pub is now removed"

Question: why remove the whole pub and not just the review? Isn't that going against the point of the site eg a comprehensive listings database? I ask that a straightforward question, out of curiosity, as I would be intrigued to know the answer. I appreciate that you might not want questions being asked about the above but I can't help myself.

Cheers

[Conrad]

Whenever we get a threat of litigation, no matter how frivolous, I find my stress levels rise, replies are written whilst walking on egg-shells. Imagine how you would feel? I'm afraid I'm a sensitive soul and it does my head in.

So when a pub considers that its first line of defence is to threaten litigation we delete them. Deleting the review is fine, but what happens the next time a bad review is left? More stress for us, at that point we have shown the pub that we will delete if they threaten to litigate, so we have taught them effectively how to get a review removed.

Heaven forbid they actually litigate because we take 10 seconds too long to respond (ah the joys of the publican who phoned us 3 times in one day to yell at me and assure me he would sue us) and they do sue. On this day it is bye bye site, labour of love does not extend to risking my future and business over a court case.

So for the safety of the site, and indeed far more importantly an end to sleepless nights for me, we just delete the pub. If the owner was reasonable they would simply ask us to remove the review, then worry about the litigation when we said no.

Also, there is a misconception in your question, the point of the site is not to be a comprehensive listings database - excuse any potential sarcasm in the next comment I use it to try and get the brain ticking over the issues - if it were why leave reviews? The point of the site, and I do have to keep reminding myself of this (take for example the question about members clubs) is for it to be enjoyable for all our members, it is about the members not the pubs. If we start charging the pubs for a listing then I think some of that dynamic changes, so we would need to accept a certain different behaviour from licensees at that point, but at least we would be paid for it.

[Quinno]

Fair does, thanks for taking the trouble to reply. I can see your point of view so if that's the way to keep the site going, then I won't argue with it.

Also, there is a misconception in your question, the point of the site is not to be a comprehensive listings database - excuse any potential sarcasm in the next comment I use it to try and get the brain ticking over the issues - if it were why leave reviews?

I would imagine that most of us assume that we are trying to get it as comprehensive as possible (I know I am)

a) because we like to have all up-to-date pubs listed when we go crawling or find ourselves in a town with a couple of hours to kill;
b) I suspect most of us have some mild form of OCD and getting all the pubs in a town/area up-to-date and 'done'

[Soup Dragon]

mild form of OCD

That's MILD form of OCD, Quinno

Conrad, i know how it plays on your mind when people threaten. Look after yourself and health first. Just don't be a stranger, Squire.