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pubtwins — House Rules

v0.1 — DRAFT. Pending lawyer review. Nothing in this document has been reviewed by a solicitor. It is written to be right, and it will be checked by someone qualified before a single real pub is named at a public URL. Until then, treat it as an honest statement of intent rather than a settled legal document.

Last updated: 14 July 2026.

Every pub has a twin somewhere. Finding it means describing pubs honestly — the sticky bar top, the carpet that has seen things, the graffiti war in the gents that management is quietly losing. That requires people to be candid, and candour needs rules, or it curdles.

So here are ten. They are short, they are the only thing we judge a complaint against, and the seventh one is the reason this site exists in the form it does.

1. Describe the pub, not the people.

This is the whole thing. Everything else is a footnote to it.

A pub is a building, a carpet, a beer list, a smell, and forty years of decisions nobody has reversed. All of that is fair game. The people inside it are not.

Yes:

"Décor last updated during the Falklands conflict. We love it." "The bar top has a drip rail you could land a light aircraft on." "Someone has gone over management's black paint with a white marker. The war continues."

No:

Anything about a member of staff's body, face, age, accent, name, or private life. Anything about a named or identifiable customer. Anything you would not say to the landlord's face — because you can be certain the landlord will read it.

In a small pub with one person behind the bar, a remark about "the barmaid" is a remark about a specific, identifiable human being. It is also, incidentally, exactly the kind of remark that generates a solicitor's letter. Both of those are reasons to leave it out, and only one of them is legal.

This is why the questionnaire asks about the pub's dress code — branded uniform, smart, casual, whatever they own, the landlord in a cardigan — and not about anybody's piercings. A dress code is a decision the pub made. A face is not.

2. Character is not a complaint. We do not do stars.

There is no "was it any good" on pubtwins, and there never will be. Not because we're being coy — because a quality rating is a different product, that product already exists, and it is a worse product.

Aloof staff, a sticky bar, and toilets you would rather not describe are character, not faults. "Magnificently indifferent" is a legitimate house style. Some of the finest pubs on earth would score a four out of five on the toilet-condition question and be prouder for it. If you came here to punish a pub, you have taken a wrong turn; the review sites are two doors down and they'll be delighted to see you.

3. Answer what you actually saw.

Not what you assume, not what you heard, not what the place was like in 2011.

Every question has a "Didn't look" button, and it is a real answer, not a cop-out. A shrug is information: it tells us nobody has checked the cellar door yet. A guess is not information — it is noise wearing information's coat, and it drags a real pub toward being a fictional one.

If you have never been in, do not fill it in. That is not a rule we can enforce with software. It's a rule we can only ask you to keep, so we're asking.

4. Flavour text is a punchline, not a witness statement.

Two short free-text fields exist so a pub can be funny in a way a checkbox can't. They are the highest-risk thing on the site, so they carry the tightest rules.

In flavour text, do not:

Aim at fittings, carpets, and décor decisions. Aim at the jukebox, the lighting, the choice of tile. Aim, if you must, at whoever thought a chalkboard font was a personality. Never aim at a person.

5. Photograph the carpet, not the customers.

(Photos are not live yet. These rules land with them.)

Photos are screened automatically before they go public, which will catch the obvious and miss the subtle. Rules 1 and 5 are what catch the subtle. Please be the filter.

6. Come alone.

One pub, one honest opinion, yours.

Organising a group to flood a pub with identical answers — to bury it, boost it, or as a laugh — is the one form of dishonesty that actually damages the product, because it corrupts the data everyone else's twins are built from.

It is also, we should say plainly, mostly futile. Answers are weighted by how long an account has existed and how far they stray from what everyone else who has actually stood in that pub reports. A fortnight-old account insisting a cinder-block dive is a polished craft temple gets a fraction of a vote and then fades out of the profile on its own. Nobody has to flag it. Nobody has to judge it. The arithmetic simply declines to believe you.

We would still rather you didn't. Coordinated campaigns get accounts removed.

7. Money and moderation never touch. This is a pledge, not a policy.

We will never charge a pub — or anyone else — to take content down. Not directly, not as an upsell, not as an unspoken understanding, not ever.

Read that again, because it is the most important line in this document and it is the reason pubtwins is built the way it is.

There is a well-worn business model in which a company hosts complaints about small businesses and then sells those businesses a relationship that makes the complaints feel more manageable. Nobody ever writes that down. It doesn't need writing down; it just needs to be possible, and everyone can smell it. We are not doing it, and we are stating so publicly so that you can hold us to it.

Concretely, and permanently:

The design backs the pledge up. Most of what looks like moderation here is arithmetic (rule 6) — outliers fall out of a pub's profile by themselves. The less our moderation depends on a human judgment call, the less there is for anyone to sell.

8. Landlords: a right of reply, not a delete button.

If you run the pub, claim your listing — free, always free. Claiming gets you two things:

What claiming does not get you is a delete button, and we would like to explain why rather than just refuse.

Your flags are judged against these ten rules — the same rules, by the same process, as everyone else's. If a line breaks rule 1 or rule 4, it comes down, and it would have come down for a stranger's flag too. If it is merely unflattering — if the complaint is that somebody has accurately described your carpet — it stays, and we will say so and tell you which rule we relied on.

That has to be true, or the whole site is worthless. A pub description that can be edited by the pub is an advert. There are places to put adverts. This is not one.

And here is the part landlords tend to be relieved by: a takedown costs your pub nothing. Your twin profile is built entirely from structured answers — the scales, the enums, the dive-o-meter. Free text never enters the matching engine at all. We can hide a sentence that shouldn't be there without so much as nudging your pub's character, its score, or its twin. Moderation and matching are separate systems, on purpose. Nothing you lose to a flag was doing any work.

9. Some things we take entirely seriously.

The joke stops here, completely and without exception.

The following will be removed on sight, will end your access to the site, and where the law requires it or common sense demands it, will be reported to the relevant authority:

If you believe someone is in immediate danger, contact the police first (999 in the UK, 911 in the US). Then tell us, and we will preserve what we hold.

10. Report it. Here is exactly what happens next.

How to report. Every pub page, every flavour line, and every photo carries a Report button. It takes one click, it does not require an account, and it never tells the reporter's identity to the pub.

[TO CONFIRM: named contact point. UK OSA and EU DSA both require a named human being and a monitored contact address, not "the team". A real name and a real address — e.g. reports@pubtwins.com — must be printed here before launch.]

What happens next.

  1. We acknowledge it. You get a reference, immediately.
  2. We look at it against these ten rules. Not against who reported it, not against who runs the pub, not against whether anybody involved has ever given us a penny (rule 7).
  3. Content in rule 9 goes immediately, before any review, and stays gone.
  4. We decide, and we tell you what we decided and which rule we used. If we leave something up, you get a reason. "No action" without an explanation is how platforms train people to stop bothering — we would rather you kept bothering.
  5. You can appeal. Reporter or landlord, either way, once, to a human who did not make the first decision.
  6. We write it down. Every decision goes into a permanent, append-only moderation log. We keep it even after the offending content is gone — that is deliberate, it is required of us by the UK Online Safety Act and the EU DSA, and it is described in the privacy notice.

Timescales: [TO CONFIRM: our target response time. We should commit to a number — 48 hours for a rule 9 report, a small number of working days for everything else — and it must be a number we can actually hit while this is one person and a laptop, not one we would like to hit.]

And once a month, we show our workings. We publish a summary of what we did: how many reports we received, in what categories, how many things came down, how many stayed up, how many appeals we received, and how many of those appeals we lost. Including the ones we lost — a transparency report that never admits a mistake is a marketing document. There will be a number in it that embarrasses us, and it will still be in there.

What we do when something comes down

Almost nothing.

If a flavour line breaks a rule, we hide the line. That is the whole action. The pub's character profile — the scales, the enums, the dive-o-meter, the graffiti stratigraphy, everything that decides which pub in Atlanta is its long-lost sibling — is built from structured answers only. Free text never touches the matching engine. It cannot; the schema physically forbids it.

So a removal takes down one sentence and leaves the pub exactly as it was: same character, same score, same twin. This is not an accident of the design. It is the design. It means moderation is cheap, it means it is never leverage over a pub, and it means nobody at pubtwins ever has a reason to hesitate before hiding something that shouldn't be there.

If you think we got it wrong

Say so. Appeal (rule 10), and if you still think we're wrong after that, say so publicly — we would genuinely rather argue about a bad call in the open than quietly develop a habit of them.

pubtwins is affectionate. It mocks fittings, carpets, and forty-year-old décor decisions, and it is fond of every single one of them. It does not mock people, and it never will.

These rules are v0.1 and have not yet been reviewed by a lawyer. They will be. Where the lawyer and the joke disagree, the lawyer wins.