PubCrawl Is Social Now

Until now PubCrawl was something you opened to plan a night and closed when it started. There's a new Out tab, and it's for the night itself.

See which friends are out

Check in when you get somewhere and your friends can see which pub you're in. They check in, you see theirs. That's the whole feature.

Two things worth knowing about how it works:

Being "out" lasts about three hours, and every new check-in resets the clock — so a proper crawl keeps you visible all evening without you having to think about it. And when you're done, Heading home on your profile stops it immediately rather than making you wait the window out.

It's accepted friends only. Not the public, and not people who've merely asked to be your friend — both of you have to have accepted.

Share the night as it happens

A check-in can be a post: the pub, the time, and a photo and caption if you want. It goes to your friends, who can like it and leave comments — including replies to each other.

A post is not the same as putting a photo on a pub's page, and the two are now completely separate. A post goes to your friends and stops there. There's no longer any way to send one to a pub's public page, because asking you to decide that while you're standing at a bar was never a fair moment to ask.

If you do want to add a photo to a pub's page — and they're genuinely useful, they're what makes a pub's page worth looking at — you do it from the pub's own page, where that's the whole point of the button.

Find where's actually busy

The Out tab also shows which pubs near you have people in them right now, whether or not you know anyone there.

This one names nobody, ever — it's counts only, and a pub doesn't appear at all until there are at least three people in it. In a small town on a quiet Tuesday, "1 person here" tells you exactly who that is, which would defeat the point of the friends-only rule two paragraphs up.

Your pub map

Every check-in adds to a map of pubs you've been to, with a count against the total in your city — 12 of 340 in Canterbury. It's on your profile, and it turns out to be the thing that makes the next check-in feel worth making.

The map itself — the actual pins, the specific pubs — is only ever visible to you and your friends. Never the public, never a stranger who found your profile.

Private by default

New accounts start private, and we've moved every existing account to private as well. You can turn it off whenever you like — have a look at Settings → Privacy to see where yours is.

We did that because the old default was the other way round, and the setting never really explained what "not private" meant — so nobody had made an informed choice. Rather than assume, we've gone with the more careful option and made the screen say plainly what each setting does.

Here's what that actually means. With a private profile, your posts, pubs, reviews and stats are limited to accepted friends. Your name and photo stay visible either way, so people can still find you and send a request — a private account is findable, just not readable.

With it turned off, a signed-in stranger can see your pub count and the city you visit most. Not your map, not your posts, not where you are. Just the totals.

Presence has always been friends-only and hasn't changed.

And the rest

Comments are checked before anyone else sees them, and photos going onto a pub's page are checked before they're published. Photos also carry hidden GPS data from your phone, so we strip it and publish a resized copy — never your original file.

You'll find all of it under Settings → Privacy, where each toggle now says what it does rather than what it's called.

Have a good one. 🍻