The Open Guide to London: the free London guide

Topic added by IvorW

It is a fact of life that pubs change their name from time to time. It is also a fact of life that restaurants sometimes go out of business.

Owing to premises licensing considerations, a restaurant will tend to remain as a restaurant, though this is less true for pubs now :(.

So, how should we on OpenGuides, track how a given site is being used? Our indexing currently works by node title, but we need ideally to show the history of a pub's name changes, in one node.

I propose that when there is a name change, the old pub name node is cut & pasted into the new one, and a note added under the section ==== Pub name changes ====. The old pub writeup is replaced with a #REDIRECT to the new page.

When it comes to restaurants, they often reopen as a completely different type of restaurant. e.g. the Standard Tandoori, Acton became an S and M cafe. I think that the old writeup should stay, but a link should be added to the new page.

These are my opinions. What do others think?

--- I think that's an awful lot of effort. Assuming OGL is to remain primarily an up-to-date reference site rather than a repository for material of historical interest, I think that:

1. If an establishment closes and a new one opens in its place, the old review should be removed (yes, removed!) from the site as soon as a new review is written
2. If an establishment changes name, the name of the establshment in the review should be changed. Coding hassle is better than complicating the business of adding/changing entries for the site's users. If the person making the change adds to the review the fact that the establishment used to be known by a different name, that would be nice. That way a search for the old pub name will still bring up the new one.