When we get it wrong.

Email press@seabiz.rip, or use the tip form on the home page.

The most useful report names the business and says what is wrong — closed when it is open, wrong date, wrong location, or confused with a similarly-named business elsewhere. A link to something showing the correct position helps most, for the same reason we require one to publish.

This is a small, independently run project. There is no newsroom behind it and no guaranteed response time — claiming one would be the kind of promise this page exists to avoid.

When a closure is withdrawn, its page stops asserting the closure and returns a real HTTP 410 Gone with an explanation of what happened. That status matters: it tells search engines and archives the page was deliberately removed, rather than leaving a silent redirect or a page that pretends it never existed.

The record itself is not deleted. It is marked no longer current, and the prior state and the reason are written to an audit table first. Any withdrawn record can be restored exactly as it was.

When a published closure changes, it is marked no longer current and its prior state and reason are written down first — it is not removed. Every corrective operation on the published record writes its own reversal trail before it changes anything:

• Withdrawn closures — prior classification and the reason for withdrawal, so any subset restores exactly.
• Date repairs — when unreliable dates were removed, each original value was recorded first.
• Identity merges — when two rows turn out to be one business, the merge is recorded so the closures can be moved back.

This is the same discipline as the citation rule, applied backwards: we do not publish a claim we cannot show you the source for, and we do not remove one without keeping the evidence of what changed.

The honest limit: this covers the published record. Behind it, maintenance work has occasionally merged duplicate rows outright — two database entries that were always the same restaurant. Those merges are recorded, but a merged-away row is not recoverable field-for-field the way a withdrawn closure is.

Some limits are structural rather than accidental, and are published rather than hidden:

• Businesses sharing a name at different addresses cannot always be told apart, so a closure may sit on the wrong one of a pair. Where we cannot attribute confidently, we do not guess.
• Some dates are estimates derived from when a source reported a closure rather than when it happened. Those are labelled on the record and excluded from trend figures.
• Public-health closures are often temporary. A county closure record is evidence a business was closed, not proof it never reopened.

The fuller version of what this record does and does not claim is on About, and the methodology is on Press & Data.