Step 1 — Discovery
We maintain a registry of event sources per metro: studio websites, ICS calendar feeds, Eventbrite searches, Meetup categories, and community listings. When you add a metro (we have 16 today), we seed it with the 5–25 most-likely sources and let our crawlers loose.
Step 2 — Extraction
For each source we pick a parsing strategy: ICS feeds get the iCalendar parser, well-formed HTML gets the JSON-LD parser, messy HTML gets the AI parser (Claude Haiku 4.5), and Eventbrite uses its official v3 API. Frequency is per-source: high-yield sources crawl every 6 hours, dormant ones once a week.
Step 3 — Confidence scoring
Every extracted event candidate starts at confidence 100 and we subtract points for missing or suspicious fields: no venue, vague title, no date, etc. The score sits next to the event in our internal queue. Candidates ≥90 auto-publish. Candidates 60–89 land in a curator queue. Candidates <60 get flagged for review or dropped.
Step 4 — The trust ladder (for submissions)
When you submit an event directly (instead of waiting for our crawlers to find it), we score your submission based on how much we know about you:
- 60 — anonymous first-time submitter. Goes to curator review.
- 75 — returning submitter whose prior submission was approved. Goes to curator review with priority.
- 85 — verified studio owner or verified organizer. Auto-publishes (above the 90 threshold? Close enough that curators only spot-check).
- 90+— domain-verified organization. Top of the ladder; reserved for established producers we've onboarded.
Claim your studio or start an organizer claim to move up the ladder.
Step 5 — Publication
Approved candidates become canonical events and get occurrences written for the next 180 days (we expand recurrence rules at write-time so the search RPC stays fast). Events surface immediately on the public page, in the weekly digest, and via the calendar feed.
Step 6 — Corrections and removals
Every event detail page has a correction form. Submit a fix, a takedown, or a duplicate flag. We review within 48 hours. Verified studio owners can also email hello@lodance.app for faster turnaround on their own studio's listings.
Costs & data
LODance is free to use — no paywall, no ads. Events are public information; we don't resell them. The AI extraction costs about $15–20/month at current scale, paid by Perry. If you find the directory valuable and want to contribute, the best way is to submit events and to report corrections.