What the snug is for
Under the record on every pub page there is the snug: a place to write what you remember about that building. A night in 1974, the landlord who would not take paper money, the wall that came down in the eighties, the smell of the back bar. That is the whole point of it.
The line above the snug says it plainly: above, the record — below, what readers remember. The two sit beside each other and neither pretends to be the other.
What belongs here
- A memory of the place. Yours, or one you were told by somebody who was there — say which.
- Which decade it was, as near as you can manage. “Some time in the seventies” is useful; “a while ago” is not.
- A correction with something behind it. If you know a date is wrong and you know where the proof is — a deed, a licence, a newspaper, a listing — write it here and we will go and look. How we date a pub sets out what we count as proof, and if you would rather send it privately there is always suggest a correction.
What does not
These are declined on sight, and the reason is always sent to you:
- Adverts and booking links. Including your own pub. Especially your own pub.
- Reviews. Of the beer, the food, the staff or the prices. There are other sites for that and they are better at it.
- Anything about a living person they would not want printed. A landlord’s name in a fond story is fine. An accusation is not, and we will not publish it however true you believe it to be.
- Anything under forty characters, which is not a memory yet.
How long we take
Nothing waits longer than a day. Your first memory is read by a person before it appears — that is the only one — and after that you post straight to the page. If we are slower than a day, that is our failure and not a policy.
A memory never changes the record
A date, a grade or a trading status changes when a document says so, and only then. That is true whoever writes the memory: a member of twenty years’ standing and somebody who joined this morning carry exactly the same weight against a document, which is none.
What a memory can do is point us at the document. When it does, we follow it up, and if it holds the changelog records the change and names the member who sent us there. That has happened and it is the best thing this feature does.
Photographs
There is no way to upload a photograph here, and that is deliberate. Send it to
hello@oldpubs.com instead. We can only publish a picture whose licence allows it, and that needs
a person to check — so an upload button would mostly collect pictures we are not allowed to use.
Standing
Nothing here is a score and there is no leaderboard of people. Standing is only about how much reading a person’s posts still need:
- Newcomer — your first memory is read before it appears. You can raise a glass to anything.
- Regular — two published memories, or twenty glasses received. You post straight to the page, and you get three rounds a month to give to the best memory in a room.
- Landlord — invited, usually after you have sent us a document that changed a record. Links you post go live, and a flag from you hides a memory straight away.
The only leaderboard on this site is of pubs, never of people — which pubs the most glasses have been raised to.
If we get it wrong
Every declined memory gets a line from us saying why. Reply to it. That is the complaints route, a person reads it, and if we were wrong we publish the memory and say so.
You do not need an account to complain about a memory, and you never will. Anybody can write to hello@oldpubs.com with the pub’s page and what is wrong with it, and we answer within a day. If it is about you — if a memory names you, or your house, or something you would rather was not on a public page — say so, and we take it down while we look. The people most likely to need this are exactly the people least likely to be members, which is why it is not behind a sign-in.
The snug is for over-18s.
You can withdraw any memory of your own at any time, and you can delete your account and everything in it from the account page in one step. There is no “deleted member” line left where you were. One thing takes a little longer and it would be wrong not to say so: a published memory is also built into the pub’s page, so it leaves the page itself at the next build, within a day. Ask and we will rebuild sooner — see the privacy policy.
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