Top 3 on Mosey: how to name your favourite places in Ireland

Top 3 on Mosey is how you name your favourite places in Ireland: for each question, such as coffee, brunch or a pub, you pick up to three places in your town and put them in order. Your picks are kept as a private list, you can change them whenever you like, and together with other people's answers they build a ranking of what people near you choose.

If you have ever sent a friend a text that says "my top 3 places to eat in Cork", this is that text, with a proper home. Every question can be answered from memory, and nobody is named when the answers are added up.

What is Top 3 on Mosey?

Top 3 is a set of short questions in the Mosey app about the town or city you are in. Each one asks for a favourite in a category: a coffee, a pizza, a Sunday roast, a place for a birthday meal. You answer by naming up to three places, ranked. That is the whole job.

It differs from a star rating in one way that matters: it is a ranking you build yourself, not a score. Rating a café three stars says little; putting it second behind a place you love tells another person a good deal.

Top 3 sits beside the rest of Mosey rather than replacing it. You still rate a meal by the dish, add tags and photographs, and keep lists. Our guide to how rating a place works on Mosey covers that side. Top 3 is the quick version: no meal to describe, just your favourites.

How do you name your favourite places in Ireland with Top 3?

You need the Mosey app and an account. Open it and the Home screen shows the next question that is waiting for you, with a line such as how many you have answered so far. You tap it and see a search box and the places people mention most in your town. Type a name, tap a place to add it, and move the places into order. Save, and the next question is offered straight away.

Some details worth knowing:

• Your town comes from where you are. Mosey works out the town or city from your phone's position and asks the questions for that place. A small village is grouped with the nearest larger town, so you are not asked to rank a street with two places on it.
• You can name fewer than three, and change them later. One place is a good answer if you only have one favourite, and you can swap, reorder or remove a place at any time.
• A place must fit the question. For the pizza question you are offered places that carry the pizza tag, and for the outdoor seating question, places tagged for outdoor seating. If a place you expect is missing, it probably does not carry that tag yet. Adding the tag when you rate it fixes that for the next person.
• Only public places are offered. Places that have closed, are hidden or are hotels do not appear.

If the question is about your favourite meal, there is no tag to match: any public place in the town can be named, because a favourite meal can be anywhere.

What does Top 3 ask about in Ireland?

The questions are set by Mosey for each country, and you see the ones for the country you are in. In Ireland the list covers the everyday and the occasional:

• Everyday: coffee, restaurant, brunch, breakfast, pastries, pizza and burger.
• Cuisines: Italian, Indian, Chinese, Mexican, Spanish and sushi.
• Irish favourites: Sunday roast, carvery, pub and chipper.
• Moments: date night, favourite meal, birthday meal, catch-up with friends, family dinner and business lunch.
• Drinks and extras: cocktails, craft beer, dessert, outdoor seating, late-night bites and value.

The list can grow, and a new question is offered like any other. Some answers will be easy and some will leave you staring at the ceiling. People who would never write a review will happily say where they take their parents for Sunday lunch.

How often does Top 3 ask, and can you skip a question?

You answer as many as you like. Home shows one question at a time and offers another as soon as you have answered, until every question is done. There is no limit and nothing to miss. If you have two minutes on a bus, answer two. If you want to sit down with a cup of tea and do the lot, do the lot. Any question you have not answered can be answered whenever you want, in any order.

Skipping is fine. If a question is not for you, say you do not drink cocktails, tap skip. You can come back and answer it later, and an answered question can always be changed.

After every two Top 3 questions Mosey slips in a travel question, covered below. Answering several in a row just brings it round sooner.

A reminder is available if you want one. It is off until you switch it on, so nothing nudges you unless you have said so.

How do your answers become a list of favourite places?

Every answer you save is added to a list that Mosey creates for you in the town you answered in, named along the lines of "My Dublin top 3s". The list has one section per question, so your coffee picks sit together, your Sunday roast picks sit together and so on, in the order you ranked them.

That list is an ordinary Mosey list, with three useful consequences:

• It is private by default. Nobody sees it unless you choose to make it public with the usual switch on a list.
• You can edit it like any other list. Add a place by hand, rename a section, or share it with a friend. Places you add yourself are never removed when your Top 3 answers change.
• It stays in step with your answers. If you stop naming a place in Top 3, it leaves the list. If it was in two sections, it stays once, in the first.

When a cousin visits from abroad, you can send the list rather than trying to recall a name outside a train station. Our guide to making and sharing a list of places shows how, and building your own Dublin food guide with Mosey lists shows what a finished one can look like. The lists feature page has the short version.

There is a second route to a list. If three or more of the places you have rated share a tag, say they are all cafés, Mosey suggests turning them into a list. Top 3 comes from memory; that one comes from your own record.

How does Top 3 turn answers into a ranking?

When you name places, you are also adding to a town ranking. Mosey scores it with points: a person's first pick gets three points, their second two and their third one. Add up everyone's points for a category and the places with the most are at the top. If two places are level, the one more people named comes first.

A few rules keep it honest:

• It starts from the first answer. There is no minimum number of people before a ranking appears. Mosey shows how many people a ranking rests on ("based on one person's top 3" or "based on" a number of people), so you can judge a short list for what it is.
• Nobody is named. The ranking shows places, never who picked them. A private profile still counts without being shown.
• One answer per person, per question, per town. Answering again replaces your earlier one.
• A closed place drops off. If your second pick closes, your third pick moves up to second, and the ranking adjusts. Nobody is left with a gap.
• If you run a place, you cannot rank it. Owners and their teams are refused when they try to name their own business, and a place they come to run later is left out of the count.
• Nobody can pay to move up. A place's position comes only from what people name.

Each town's ranking is shown in the app as that town's favourites, question by question. It is worth a look before a Saturday in a town you do not know. The ranked lists on the Mosey site cover the places people rate.

What are the Top 3 travel questions?

Top 3 is not only about where you live. Mosey also asks travel questions, which mix in after every couple of questions about your own town. They come in three kinds.

A vote on a place you have been to. For example, how good a particular city was for food. You answer with a score from one to five, with one decimal if you want it. Mosey only names a place if it is on your food passport, the record of where you have rated, and away from home, so it never asks about a city you have not been to or tells anyone where home is.

An open question that names nothing. These ask you to name up to three cities, towns or countries you have been to for food, ranked. Because the question names no place, it can be asked of anyone. You search for a place of the right kind, rank up to three, or skip.

A question about one country or one region. Once a country is on your passport, Mosey may ask which food town or city you have been to in that country, and your picks must be inside it.

There is also a wish list version, and it is the fun one: which towns in Spain, Italy, France, Portugal, Japan, Mexico or the UK would you love to eat your way around? You can answer it without having been anywhere. Wish answers are stored apart from the places you have been, so a dream can never count as a recommendation.

You can name a town abroad that has no Mosey places yet; the questions are about towns, cities and countries, never neighbourhoods. If you are planning a trip, Mosey Travel shows the other half, with hubs for towns and the vote on a trip city.

Can you make a travel list public?

Yes. Open answers add up to public travel lists, such as food towns in Spain, or towns people would love to eat their way around. These are shown as a top ten, ranked by the same three-two-one points, from the first answer. Unlike the town rankings, a travel list shows no counts of people or points. They are global, with every Mosey market and every answerer in one list, and they have pages on the Mosey website.

Your own travel answers are private until you decide otherwise. You can make one of your lists public from the app, which gives it a page of its own that you can send to a friend. Two things have to be true first: your profile cannot be private, and you need a chosen username rather than a placeholder. Mosey tells you if either is missing. The page shows your first name, your username, your picture if you have one, and your picks, with no counts and nothing else about you. Make it private again and the page stops showing straight away.

This is a handy way to share a trip: before a week in Portugal, a friend who has been can send you their list of towns in the order they would visit.

If you also like the idea of eating your way through your own country, see how Mosey counts counties in eating your way round all 32 counties of Ireland. That is about rated places, not Top 3 answers, but the two sit well together.

How do you share your picks and get more from Mosey?

Top 3 is at its most useful alongside the rest of the app. A few ways to combine them:

• Share your picks as a picture. The app can draw your ranked places, question by question, as an image to send to friends or post. It carries place names only. Your first name appears only if you switch it on each time you share.
• Rate the dish as well. A Top 3 answer says where you go; a rating says what to order. Our guide to finding a place by the dish shows how the two combine.
• Tag the people you ate with. Tagging friends lets them add their own rating to the same meal.
• Follow friends. Following people shows their picks on the map and on Home, so you see where they eat without asking.
• Earn your badges. Rating places earns food badges, and rating across the counties of the island earns place badges. The badges guide explains the levels.

You can get the app from the Mosey download page.

What does Top 3 never do?

It helps to know the limits.

• It never asks you to pay, and nobody can pay to rank. A place's position comes from what people name.
• It never publishes your list without you. The list is private until you turn the public switch on.
• It never shows who picked what. Rankings carry places, and the numbers of people behind them, never names.
• It never labels a place safe. Top 3 says nothing about allergens. If you need to avoid one, use the dish filter that hides dishes listing it, and ask the place, because a dish with nothing listed means allergens are not listed, not that there are none.

There is no prize for the longest list and no penalty for a short one. Name what you would tell a friend, in the order you would tell it.

There is more on choosing and planning in the guides.