People had been signing up steadily after we added the ability to sign up to the site — about one or two a night. But after KaraokeCrowd got listed on r/karaoke, that jumped to five to ten a night. More importantly, people started trying to help: adding places, sharing karaoke nights, confirming whether listings were still real, and poking around the parts of the site that had mostly been used by one person — myself — until now.

So the last two weeks made a lot of rough edges obvious: people ran into edge cases, bugs, and confusing explanations. I got to work making the useful paths clearer and making them actually work well.

If you know about a karaoke night

The biggest change is a completely new flow for adding a karaoke series. Sharing a karaoke night used to mean submitting a venue, waiting for it to be approved, then coming back to submit the event series, with a lot of guessing about whether the venue was already in the directory. The new data entry form puts that in one guided path:

  • Step 1: Where does karaoke happen? Pick an existing venue or add a new one, with type-ahead duplicate detection so you don't add a place that's already listed.
  • Step 2: When does karaoke happen? Use the recurrence options people actually need — weekly, biweekly, monthly, monthly-by-weekday (like "third Friday"), irregular, one-time.
  • Who hosts it? A separate step for the host, with the option to skip or just type a name.
  • What's the vibe? Free-form vibe tags on top of the chip picker.
  • Review & submit. Optional evidence (Facebook/Instagram link + your relation to the venue).

Most of the work after launch was unglamorous and necessary: fixing all kinds of bugs and making the site communicate more clearly how to do things. If you tried to add a karaoke night and hit one of those walls, please try again. This flow is much closer to what it should have been from the start.

/contribute was reworked too. It had too many competing asks before; now it puts the simplest, most useful ways to help first. There is now a help center that includes guidance on various contribution and site-related topics, for example verification statuses and how sometimes the most reliable and fastest way to check an event is to phone the venue.

There is also a new /contribute/confirm-past feed for checking recent past events. You can confirm what happened inline, undo if you clicked the wrong thing, and help keep old listings from drifting out of date.

If you're looking for somewhere to sing

Home was rebuilt to make the main choices clearer: browse karaoke in big cities, look at all upcoming events as a list, open the map, or contribute something you know. /cities is new too. There was no city index before this period, and now it is easier for search engines and LLM crawlers to pick up the info, so the karaoke nights you list here become easier to find.

The map page was cleaned up — the global footer is hidden on full-viewport pages, the tablet sidebar slimmed down so the map gets more width, the world no longer repeats horizontally at low zoom, and signed-in users get the map automatically centered on their primary saved location. There's a new "View <city> page" shortcut at the top of the sidebar when you're near a city we have a dedicated page for, and saved locations are now a single dropdown listing all of them, primary first.

Events got more practical filters: date-range pills, a custom-dates modal, and an end-to-end host filter. Events and venues now share the same location banner, venue lists default to distance when you have a location set, and alphabetical sorting stays truly alphabetical inside a geographic radius.

The location picker — used on the new onboarding flow, the profile settings, the contribution wizard, and the home page — became a real autocomplete combobox. Debounced, with an absolute-positioned dropdown that doesn't shove the page around, full keyboard navigation, and an attempt at giving correct screen-reader semantics.

City-only storage for saved locations. Previously the form let you paste raw coordinates or hit a high-accuracy GPS read — either of which could persist a street-level location tied to your account. Two changes went in: the picker now does a low-accuracy GPS read, reverse-geocodes to a city name, and drops it into the autocomplete so you pick a city centroid; and the server rounds every submitted coordinate to about a kilometer before saving. Nothing in your saved locations is finer-grained than a city, regardless of what your browser is willing to share. Search radii are unaffected — the smallest one is 10 km.

Following is starting to matter too. Venue and host follows now feed a daily activity digest, and the deployment pieces are in place for weekly and monthly roundups. I intend to make these a reason to come back and check or confirm what changed. I'm happy to make adjustments and improvements to the notifications and roundups based on your feedback.

If you host or represent a venue

Host and venue pages were improved to be cleaner and make the useful actions easier to find. Venue pages now include a way to follow everyone active at that venue, instead of finding each host one by one.

Hosts got clearer booking and call-to-action areas too. Claimed hosts can make some profile edits and see them land right away, instead of waiting in the moderation queue to see their own changes.

Event pages now use a modal for confirming or reporting status, so someone can say whether they attended, called the venue, checked a social post, or have another source. Confirmations carry provenance and evidence dates, which gives guides a better trail when deciding whether something should stay listed as expected, confirmed, suspected, or cancelled.

Better foundations underneath

KaraokeCrowd only works if we can keep the directory up to date. That only works if the basic paths are reliable:

  • Form input preservation. Settings, onboarding, and host-edit forms used to wipe everything you just typed when validation failed. They now keep your input and surface field-level errors instead of a generic banner.
  • Photo upload is coming, not launched yet. The storage model, SSR image renderer, upload signing path, moderation queue, lifecycle cleanup, and integrity checks all moved forward. The public UI still says photo uploads are not working yet, because there are still bugs and issues to sort through. This is necessary groundwork for nicer venue and host pages, and potentially social features later.
  • i18n sweep. More hardcoded English was removed, German and French got some improvements, Spanish support was added in neutral Latin American Spanish, and notification emails now use your preferred language.
  • Cancelled events read as cancelled at a glance by using strikethrough text styles.

Why it matters

When a karaoke fan signs up, opens the home page, and checks their city or shares a night they know about, the path from "curious" to "useful contribution" needs to be short and trustworthy. The last two weeks were about removing many of the reasons someone would give up. If you tried to add info and something felt broken or unclear, this is a good moment to try again.

Thank you for being here with me to make this project a reality!

Sabine