Why this is harder than it looks
A convention is not a tidy database row. It is a date on a Squarespace page that moved twice, a venue announced in an Instagram story, a show that quietly stopped happening in 2023 but still has a live website. Small local cons are the worst offenders and the most worth finding.
So the work is mostly the unglamorous part: checking whether a thing is still real, and fixing it when it is not.
- Finding sourcesEvery one of the 366 sites we watch was added deliberately. There is no magic firehose to subscribe to.
- Verifying datesOrganizers move shows, sometimes without announcing it. We recheck the whole list every week and flag anything that stops appearing at its own source.
- Killing bad recordsTouring cons with one page per city are a menace: automated extraction happily invents a Houston show in Utah. Those get caught and deleted, and then we write a rule so that particular lie cannot come back.
- Filling in the boring fieldsCity, state, venue, coordinates, a working link. A listing without them is not much use to anyone planning a trip.
- Retiring dead showsA con that ended is worse than a missing one, because someone will drive to it.
This is a community effort
FanConHub is a small independent project, not a company with a research team. The list gets better mostly because people who care about their local scene tell us things: a new show in a town we do not cover, a date that changed, a con that is not coming back this year.
Organizers, artists, and regulars know their corner of this world far better than any scraper does. If you know something we have wrong, you are the fix.
Please do not scrape or repackage it
This is the part we would rather not have to write. Cleaned convention data is expensive to produce and trivial to copy. A bulk scrape takes someone an afternoon and takes from us the only thing that makes the work sustainable, which is people actually visiting the site that keeps the list alive.
We are not going to threaten anyone. We are asking. If small directories get strip-mined, they stop getting maintained, and everyone ends up back on page four of a search engine trying to work out whether a con still exists.
Yes, please do
- Link to us, from anywhere, as much as you like.
- Quote a handful of listings with a credit and a link back.
- Use the site to plan your own cons, tables, and trips.
- Share an event page with your group chat, subreddit, or Discord.
- Point organizers here so their show gets listed correctly.
Please do not
- Bulk scrape or crawl the site to rebuild the dataset elsewhere.
- Republish the listings wholesale, with or without a credit.
- Feed the whole directory into a competing con listing or app.
- Resell the data, or pass it off as your own research.
- Hammer the site with automated traffic. It is a small operation.
Want the data? Just ask
Genuinely: ask. If you are building something useful for fans, running a research project, or organizing a show and you want your listing in a particular format, we would rather talk to you than find out later by watching our own list turn up somewhere else. Most reasonable requests get a yes.
Get in touch