I went to check in to a local bar in Foursquare and was rather surprised to find that it existed twice in their database as a venue. That can’t be good. Is there some way to clean that up or otherwise fix things so that there’s one venue?
What you’re seeing are the rough edges of any user-generated database, actually, exacerbated by the fact that Foursquare (a geolocation game for the iPhone, Droid, Blackberry, etc) awards bonus points if you create a new venue in their database rather than check into an existing spot.
Needless to say, it’s not uncommon in my experience to see the same place listed more than once on Foursquare and to even have them in slightly different locations on the map. Usually that tells me that one was created at the venue and the other on the way to/from the venue.
Fortunately, it’s not too difficult to fix it, though you do have to pay attention to what you’re doing as you go, because the venue number from the venue that you think is the “good” or reference entry needs to be entered on the page that is the duplicate, less helpful entry.
Here’s what I saw on my iPhone, as an example, when I was having dinner at the California Pizza Kitchen this evening:
As you can see, there were two matches for “pizza” within a small radius of my current location, both of which are for the same restaurant. Not so good!
To fix it, I needed to go to Foursquare.com and log in. First step then was to search for the venue on the site:
There are those two matches again. Since I’m using Google’s Chrome browser, I can take a shortcut: move my cursor over a clickable link and on the lower left it shows the URL of that link. For the good venue entry, I do this and ascertain:
You can see the venue number here: 208757
Now click on the other, the duplicate venue entry, and check out what it shows us:
See the little box in the middle with the “submit” button next to it? Look closely and you’ll see it says “Is this a duplicate? We can merge this listing with another venue listing. Just enter the venue #id below”.
So that’s what I’ll do. I type in “208757” and click on “submit”:
That’s all there is to it. Now it’s up to the crack admin team at Foursquare to fix and tweak things to make the database happy. Not too bad, eh?
Thanks, this was exactly what I was looking for. There is a suggest an edit function on the phone app and I clicked on it and then clicked duplicate and then is asked what it was a duplicate of and highlighted my biz.
Thanks!!!!
Yup, I have superuser privileges on FourSquare. Can’t say what it’d look like without them because, well, I have them. 🙂
Or perhaps, Dave, you are a superuser and didn’t realize that you see something different than we see when clicking on venues.
Yeah. I spent a few minutes on this before I realized that pages aren’t set up like this any more in 4sq. Dave, please modify this page before anybody else wastes their time on it. It shows up first on a google search of “foursquare duplicate venues” but the info is misleading.
Only Super Users can merge venues:
“Super users can merge venues from the venue page. For everyone else, stay tuned as we’ll be building these tools soon”.
I can’t seem to find the submit button either. Foursquare really needs to make an easier way to report these.
Has the format of the page changed? There is no longer a little box in the middle with the “submit” button next to it? Is there a new way to remove a venue?