New page for contributing sports bars

We've redesigned our 'contribute' page on our site that lists sports bars in London – other people might call it 'add a venue' or 'upload' or something but we like to be different. We also like to think of our users contributing to the online community.

Originally we had quite a long form that required lots of information from the user and reflected our internal structure too much. After realising that we have to do a bit of work on every venue anyway (getting an accurate lat/lon, sourcing a photo etc) and we were often checking the validity of places ourselves, we figured things could be a lot simpler for the user. After all, you don't want to be looking for the phone number of a bar when you were just trying to give us a recommendation.

Along with simplifying the amount of information required, we also changed one of the fields. We originally had one called 'description' which was kind of a hangover from when we were going to have some descriptive text about each venue before we decided to focus exclusively on user reviews. Much better to turn this into a field for a review of the venue... as it makes sense to capture a review from someone at the same time because if they're adding it, they're likely to have been there.

So it's just the five steps now and here's more or less what the new design looks like:

You can only see it if you're logged into the site but we'd certainly love feedback on how well it's working, so do sign up (unless you're a bot, in which case don't). It takes literally 30 seconds...


Originally posted on Tumblr on 30th September 2011.

Finding the best places to watch sport

There's a school of thought that we've come across, that pubs aren't the best places to watch sport. To many people, they conjure images of boozed up, angry, shouty, small-minded, football fans providing a stream of ignorant commentary to accompany the action. And in case you haven't noticed, most of our venues are pubs or bars.

But to us who started this website, this really hasn't been the experience we've come across in our time as pub-going sports fans. Sure, it's happened but those occasions have been far in the minority. Some of our favourite memories involve either enjoying the relaxing experience a beer, a comfortable sofa and a massive plasma screen can bring or the frenetic, all-in-this-together, loud atmosphere that you'd otherwise only get at a match.

Particularly in London, the word pub doesn't necessarily mean full of alcoholics, just like the term 'football fan' doesn't have to mean hooligan. Being a multi-cultural city with many different sport-loving groups within it and many places that you wouldn't expect, showing games, the experiences deviate far from the expected.

We want to highlight that variety and celebrate it. When we set this up, we thought it was about listing everywhere that shows live sport. But maybe we're more about letting people know the best places to do so and highlighting those lesser-known gems.

Already, most of our top 10 are cracking places to watch sport (that we can vouch for) and places where you won't find aggro and you may not have even realised have satellite sport channels. We know there's more out there (and we'll be rolling it out further afield very soon) so let us know you favourite places to experience live sport in London.

Originally posted on Tumblr on 12th September 2011.

Fanroom Beta is launched

So Fanroom is live and in Beta. It's been a long summer of work and Japanese food but we've got something useable up and running. Go gentle with us.

Here's where we're at: we've listed as many pubs in London as we can. Why London? a) Because it's where we're based. b) Because being a big city where the need to find out which pubs play sport is more pressing/useful (in a small town for example, you could easily remember which pubs show sport) c) If we can get it to work here, it should work for other cities too.

We've currently got 234 pubs listed. We reckon that's about half of all sports bars in the city. It's also more than any other sites out there that do the same thing. Oh yes, there are competitors but they're limited by charging venues to be on there. Ours is a database built by fans (us), with reviews from fans (you) and for fans (all those other fans).

It's all about the reviews and ratings, coming together to be as useful for everyone as possible. If you want a simple way to remember it, we're like Trip Advisor for sports pubs. Got that? Awesome.

Originally posted on Tumblr on 19th August 2011.