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Three cards, two shapes, and one for your whole journal

Every memory card now comes in a post shape and a story shape, and there is a new one that puts your entire concert history on a single ticket.

A memory card is the picture you get to keep after a night out - a ticket stub with the act, the room and the date on it, drawn from what you logged. There are three kinds now.

• A concert card, for one night. It names the act, the tour, the room and the festival if there was one.
• A festival card, for one weekend, with the bill and how many acts you caught.
• A passport, which is new, and is about you rather than about one night: every concert you have logged, the days you spent at a show, the countries, the cities, the act you have seen most, and where that puts you among everybody else keeping score here.

All three now draw in two shapes - a square-ish 4:5 for a post, and a tall 9:16 for a story - and you pick the one you want before you download. Either way the file comes out 1080 pixels wide.

The cards themselves were redrawn. The perforation down the side is cut out of the card now instead of being a dashed line pretending to be one, the paper has a real grain to it, and the printed code along the bottom is derived from the card itself, so no two cards carry the same one.

Your concert cards are on the concert pages, festival cards on the festival pages, and your passport is on your journal.

See the cards

Four questions about the weekend, and four about the room

You could always say how a night was. Now you can say what the festival was like, and what the venue is like - which is a different question, and the one people actually search for.

Rating a concert tells you about one evening. It does not tell you whether the sound at that club is any good, or whether the festival is worth the ticket - and those are the things somebody wants to know before they buy.

So both now have four questions of their own. They are deliberately either/or, because nobody can tell you the difference between 60% and 80% sound and everybody knows whether they could hear it.

A festival edition gets asked about the lineup, the atmosphere, the organization, and the ticket price. Only the price has a "didn't pay" escape, because somebody on a guest list cannot judge value and should not have to guess. It is asked per edition, not per festival, which is what makes the fourth section on a festival page possible: how the same weekend has held up year on year, so you can see the organization score fall the year they moved site.

A venue gets asked about the sound, the sightlines, getting in and out, and the bar prices - and you can say whether you were on the floor, in the balcony or seated, because "obstructed view" from the back of a flat floor and from a balcony are different complaints.

The venue answer is one per person, not one per visit. Somebody who has been to the same club forty times gets one vote, or the regulars decide what the room is like for everybody else. Changing your answer replaces it, and the page shows the recent years separately from the lifetime figure, so a new PA or a refit shows up instead of being averaged away by a decade of the old room.

Find a room you have been in

One review per room, added to over the years

Writing about a venue again does not overwrite what you wrote last time. It adds a dated part, so your entry becomes a timeline of the room.

A venue page where one local has forty entries is useless to somebody who came to find out about the room. But one review you can edit is worse, because editing destroys the thing that is actually worth reading.

"The sound was awful until the 2019 refit, it is a great room now" is exactly what a reader is there for, and you only get it if both halves survive.

So a venue review is one entry per person, made of dated parts, and writing again adds to it rather than replacing it:

Mar 2016 Sound is muddy anywhere behind the desk.
Nov 2024 Back after the refit. Night and day.

Writing again on the same day just edits that day. Coming back next year starts a new part, and older parts stay as they were - the timeline is the content.

This is separate from writing about a gig. What you thought of the night still belongs on the concert page; this is about the building.

Write about a room