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What
This Page is About
Released:
Monday December 8, 2003
Updated: Friday January 16, 2004
Update (January 16, 2004)
We have removed the free-form comments. Obviously both positive and negative comments were posted. The long thread of vulgarity, political assumptions and otherwise useless contents has been removed because a lot of the content was offensive and unnecessary and doesn't meet our family friendly standards.
We haven't been sent any lawsuit or further correspondence from the Ropewalk folks. So we'll post our tribute to Ropewalk and remove them down the road. Why? Because the continued useless runaround about what happened and what got us here hasn't changed. We don't want Ropewalk receiving the benefit of casual new customers being made through their use of PubCrawler.com.
Should anything change you will see it here.
Posted on December 8, 2003
Dear
Pubcrawlers,
We use to list the Ropewalk
Tavern in Baltimore, Maryland on this page. We listed them from February
2002 - December 8, 2003. They had 15 active reviews and about the same
that were deleted over the past several months.
Marc
McFaul and brother William McFaul are the owners of Ropewalk Tavern and
through their attorney Christy Saunders they are seeking to legally silence
us for providing a free speech public forum for people to post candid
reviews of Ropewalk Tavern here on Pubcrawler.com through our user reviews
section. They claim we were causing them a loss of business due to the
negative reviews that were included among their 15 reviews. They also
are threatening to sue us for using their trademark image which is shown
here to promote their own establishment:
Ropewalk
Tavern is threatening to sue us even if we use a photograph which contains
their logo. We believe their request with regards to their trademark is
overbearing and excessive and detracts from the value Pubcrawler provides
to it's visitors and establishments.
From
February 2002 until December 8, 2003 Ropewalk Tavern enjoyed receiving
in excess of an estimated 100 new customers who used Pubcrawler to find
Ropewalk Tavern. All of this was free of charge and without any input
from Ropewalk Tavern.
After
several reviews of questionable intent and several others that questioned
the beer condition and management's interaction with patrons Marc McFaul
contacted us to remove his establishments. This was only after Marc Mc
Faul took a few swings at the review submission process and rated his
place as AWESOME in an attempt to drive his rating up and then posted
some nonsense about something we have no clue about involving some vendor,
him, gift certificate owners and not redeeming those gift certificates
when people presented them at Ropewalk Tavern. After trimming several
reviews for Marc Mc Faul that we thought lacked input on the beer and
included a negative tone we were contacted again to remove Ropewalk Tavern.
This time we were more cautious about hiding the reviews our visitors
were posting in favor of promoting an establishment that seemed to have
several legitimate issues. Someone even assumed his brother's name to
post a review.
Our
visitors said bad things such as, "... they do not
pay attention to the condition of their taps.." and "...beers
taste contaminated" along with "...The owner came over and treated
me like dirt". The reviews were at times from credible Pubcrawler's
who have an established history of visiting beer focused places through
their numerous reviews.
The
turning point where Marc Mc Faul and his lawyer Christy Saunders became
one logical unit of legal harassment was after we encouraged Marc to work
with us to outreach to these reviewers who seemed to have legitimate issues
and work with them to make their Ropewalk Tavern experience a better one.
We thought providing this sort of customer support was exactly the most
key component of the core definition of the SERVICE INDUSTRY.
So
here's what we are saying:
1.
Marc McFaul and Christy Saunders are trying to silence freedom of speech
here and you should be mad. There trying to pervert the methods called
Pubcrawler which have worked well since 1995. Long before they were anywhere
near good beer.
2. Ropewalk Tavern is in the mode of intimidating people
with the threats of being bothered by the hassles, costs and travel involved
with defending a suit.
3. In all the years Pubcrawler has operated there have
been a number of famous flurries of reviews, some offensive, some non
relative. We have never removed any place for any reason
other than closure or not having an adequate beer selection.
4. We only sanitize and remove reviews when our visitors
say enough is enough or an establishment owner asks us to remove things
that are clearly off topic. We are not publishers and we do not provide
any editorial services except when necessary to trim offensive materials
or correct something for a user upon request.
5 . Ropewalk Tavern could have problems with their management
and customer focusing care based on our own experience in trying to interact
with them.
6 . You should consider other beer focused places nearby
instead of Ropewalk Tavern- we don't want them getting business and they
don't want listed here. There is a list of nearby places on the left column
of this page.
7. If you believe you are sick / have food poisoning
due to eating at Ropewalk Taven we are unable to help you. You
can however contact the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
8.
We are unfamiliar with Marc McFaul and company. We have never been to
their establishment or even in their town. They are as familiar to us
as Eddie Izzard.
9.
If you are concerned about matter such as these and want to learn more
or need an admirable non-profit for that end of year tax-deduction see:
If
you are interested in more gossip about companies and things like this,
visit our friends at:
...and
what we aren't saying:
1. We aren't saying Ropewalk Tavern has any problems
with regards to making people sick. That is they don't have any known
problems with food-borne illnesses such as botulism, e-coli, hepatitis,
salmonella or staphylococci that we are aware of.
2. Ropewalk Tavern's beer quality, storage and serving
methods have been questioned via our formerly democratic and free speech
forums - but you can't see them now - so beer buyer beware.
If
you want to reach us about this please use our contact form.
We'll
be posting letters, email and all other materials received from our friends
at Ropewalk Tavern to this page. Stay tuned!
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