How contributing works

What happens between hitting submit and your karaoke night showing up on the map.

KaraokeCrowd is a community-maintained directory. Every venue, host, and karaoke night here came from someone who sent it in. This page explains what happens after you press submit, why the system is set up the way it is, and what to expect from your contribution.

Why community submissions

Karaoke is local. Schedules change. A bar drops karaoke for a season, a host moves rooms, a new monthly night starts up, and a centralised editor wouldn't notice. The people who already go to a night spot the changes first.

So KaraokeCrowd lets anyone submit a venue, a host, or a karaoke schedule. Locals confirm what's still running, guides curate their area, and the directory stays current without one person trying to chase every club in the world.

How submissions get reviewed

Every submission goes through one of two paths:

  • Auto-approval. Simple, low-risk edits from contributors with a track record (a known local guide updating a phone number, fixing a typo, adding a missing time) skip the queue and apply immediately. They still appear in the venue's activity log so anything wrong can be reverted.
  • Guide review. Anything else, like a new venue, a major change, or a first contribution, goes into the guide queue. A guide checks the evidence you provided, looks for duplicates, and either approves, requests a follow-up, or rejects with a reason.

The split keeps the queue moving on small fixes without giving up oversight on the changes that actually shape the listing.

What the statuses mean

When you look at your submissions you'll see one of four states:

  • Pending. A guide hasn't picked it up yet. Most pendings clear within a few days; busier regions take longer.
  • Approved. Applied to the live listing. The change shows up on the venue, host, or event page and in the activity feed.
  • Follow-up. The guide needs more info. The comment explains what's missing. Edit and resubmit.
  • Rejected. The guide can't apply this. Usually a duplicate or something we don't store (private addresses, paid promotions). The reason is in the comment.

You can always see and edit your pending submissions under your contributions.

How we match venues, hosts, and series

Three things let the same place show up exactly once:

  • Venues are matched on name, address, city, and country. If you submit a venue we already have, the form points you at the existing record before you create a duplicate. Submitting again still works (a guide will merge them), but using the match is faster.
  • Hosts match on name and city. The same KJ working five bars is one host record with five venues linked to it.
  • Event series are weekly, biweekly, or monthly schedules attached to a venue. A series can have an optional host. The events that show up on the map are generated from these series, plus any one-off events submitted directly.

The matchers are fuzzy enough to catch common spelling variations ("Molly's Pub" vs "Mollys Pub") but conservative enough not to merge two real places that happen to share a name.

Share a Karaoke Night vs the legacy forms

Two ways to submit a karaoke night today:

  • Share a Karaoke Night is the recommended path. It walks through five short steps (venue, schedule, host, vibe, review) and creates the venue and the recurring series in one submission. Good fit for "I know about this karaoke night and want to add it."
  • The legacy new-venue and new-host forms still exist for power-user paths: claiming a business, attaching evidence URLs to a specific field, bulk-editing an existing record. Most contributors don't need them.

Both flows produce the same submission records under the hood; Share a Karaoke Night is just a friendlier UI on top of the same backend.

Evidence and trust

Share a Karaoke Night asks two optional things on the review step: how you know about this night (host, venue owner, been there, saw it online, other) and a supporting link. Both are optional, but they speed up review:

  • Hosts and venue owners get the most weight. A guide can usually approve a self-attested host submission quickly.
  • A link to an Instagram, Facebook event, or venue website is the most common evidence and is easy for a guide to verify in seconds.
  • "I've been there" is enough for low-risk edits. For new venues, expect a guide to cross-check before approving.

If you don't provide any of this, the submission still works. It just takes a guide a little longer to vet.

Privacy and attribution

  • Submissions are tied to your account when you're logged in. Anonymous submissions are allowed too; they just take longer to review (no track record yet).
  • Your username appears in the activity feed for approved changes when your profile is public. Guides see your account during review either way. You can opt out of public attribution by making your profile private in your profile settings; the change still happens, the credit just won't show your name.
  • We never publish your exact location. When you let the site use your location for nearby search, we round to city-level before saving anything. The full coordinate is used in-memory for the current page only.

What we promise

  • Every submission is reviewed and either applied or returned with a reason.
  • Duplicates get merged, not deleted. Your contribution to the duplicate ends up on the canonical record.
  • The directory stays free for contributors and users. No ads, no paywalled listings.

If you hit a case this page doesn't cover, the contribute page has the most up-to-date links, or jump straight to your submissions to see anything in flight.