Finding events near you with LocalSelections

An evening out is often an event rather than a restaurant: a concert, a market, a park festival. LocalSelections includes events as a category in its games, and it also keeps a stored set of upcoming events you can browse. This guide explains where those events come from, what to trust and what to double-check.

Using events in the games

When you pick Activity and the wheel lands on something like Live music, or when you use the Events option, the app looks for upcoming events near the location you share and turns the category into real listings. As with places and movies, the game chooses the type of thing and the data fills in the specifics. From the result, a "what next" menu offers directions and, for ticketed events from Ticketmaster, a link to buy tickets. LocalSelections does not sell tickets itself; the link goes to Ticketmaster.

The four places events come from

Events come from several sources.

1. Ticketmaster. Live-entertainment listings fetched when you search. We only show events that are on sale; cancelled, postponed, rescheduled and off-sale events are dropped. Because they are fetched live and not stored, a Ticketmaster event does not appear in our browsable lists.
2. City open-data calendars. We store upcoming events and permits from public datasets published by New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago, such as park events and special-event permits. They are updated on a schedule and cover those cities only.
3. Organisers' own websites. A background job reads public event listings from the websites of local businesses and venues, but only where the page publishes its events in standard structured data, and only where the site's robots rules and our own exclusion list allow it. Coverage from this source depends on which sites publish such data.
4. Submissions. Signed-in users can submit an event. Submissions are reviewed and only approved ones are shown.

Why your town might be thin

Event coverage can be uneven. Ticketmaster listings depend on what Ticketmaster carries near you, and stored free and community events depend on the sources above, which cover only some places. If your area has little listed, that is a data gap, not a sign that nothing is happening. Submitting an event is one way to fill it.

Dates, times and cancellations

Check the details before you go. Stored events show the dates we last received; an organiser can change a time after we copy it. An event that has ended is left out of our browsable list, and the page for an event that has already happened says so. Our browsable events list shows dates in UTC, so allow for your own time zone.

Reporting a problem

Events that people have submitted have a "Report this event" button. A report goes to an administrator, and nothing is hidden by the report alone; only a reviewer's decision removes an event. For city-calendar and website events, which are copied from their source, the fix is at the source: we refresh them on a schedule, so a corrected listing replaces the old one.

Stored events versus live search

Two kinds of event data sit side by side:

• Live results (Ticketmaster) are the freshest, but they exist only while you are searching and cannot be browsed afterwards.
• Stored results (city calendars, websites, submissions) have their own pages that stay put and can be linked to, but are only as current as their last refresh.

How to get the most from it

1. Share your location, so the search looks near you.
2. Choose Activity and spin, or pick the events option directly.
3. Open the event page for the source, date and venue before committing.
4. For a group, put two or three events on a live group vote and let the standings decide.
5. Confirm any event on the organiser's own page before you go.

For a quick scan of what is stored right now, see upcoming events by city. For the wider decision process, how to settle a group dinner decision works just as well for choosing an evening out.