FanCons.ca Convention Listing FAQ

1. Why don't you list every convention?
2. Why do conventions have to have a "real" web site and why isn't a Facebook page good enough?
3. How can I update our convention listing?
4. Can I still submit updates if I'm not staff of for the con?
5. Do I have to submit anime cons to both AnimeCons.com and FanCons.com?
6. I want to submit some really old cons from the 1980s. Do I still need a web site?
7. If I want to list next year's con, do I submit a new one or update the dates on this year's con?
8. Do you mind if I scrape your data for my own site?
9. What if I want to scrape your data for some kind of statistical analysis?
10. Why don't you list online/virtual conventions?
11. Why can't I list a convention as a "pop culture" con?
12. Our con has anime and comics and cosplay and fantasy and furries and horror and steampunk and everything! Why are you only listing a few?
13. What's the difference between "Gaming" and "Video Games"?
14. People sell video games at our con. Why won't you list it as a video gaming con?
15. Why is there a 6 hour requirement for cons to be listed?
16. Why do you only list some of the guests at conventions?
17. Why does it take so long for my submissions to be posted?
18. Why did someone who submitted an update after my update get theirs posted first?
19. Why is my convention name not in ALL CAPS with the tagline like I submitted?
20. Why is my convention listed with the year and not its number?
21. How can I update our logo on our listing?
22. A convention said it was "postponed" until next year. Why did you mark it "Cancelled"?
23. How do I become a curator on FanCons.ca?

Why don't you list every convention?
We set our policy on listing events in order to ensure that our listings accurately reflect a listing of actual conventions as much as possible. Many of our policies were implemented in order to stop people from submitting events that had no legitimate reason to be on a list of "conventions". For example, cosplay gatherings, anime club meetings, horror film screenings, swap meets, or fantasy art shows may be legitimate (and fun) events, but they really aren't conventions.
Even then, some conventions meet the criteria in our policy, but aren't listed simply because we didn't know about them. This is usually the case for any conventions prior to widespread use of the Internet. There are certainly some 1990s (or earlier) conventions that may have taken place where no online records exist. You're welcome to submit them and tell us about them!

Why do conventions have to have a "real" web site and why isn't a Facebook page good enough?
In order to help ensure a basic level of commitment to having a convention, we expect conventions to show minimal effort by at least setting up a web site. There are a lot of Facebook events that might be created for a "convention", but a significant portion never go beyond that. We feel that if anyone is serious about running a convention, they should have at the very least picked dates, signed on with a venue, and set up at least a minimal web site. Additionally, when we're looking for updates on the convention, it's a lot easier to find updates on a web site than have to search through a lot of old Facebook posts (which might not even be public).

How can I update our convention listing?
Every convention has a button that says "Add or Update Information for [Convention Name]". Click that, fill out the form with any updates, and submit the form. If you want to submit a new convention (or next year's edition of a convention), use our form for submitting a new convention.

Can I still submit updates if I'm not staff of for the con?
Yes! We accept submissions from anyone.

Do I have to submit anime cons to both AnimeCons.com and FanCons.com?
No. The FanCons.com database is the master database of all conventions, guests, news, reports, and other data which is also used by our sites focused on specific fandoms such as AnimeCons.com, FantasyCons.com, FurryCons.com, HorrorCons.com, SciFiCons.com, SteampunkCons.com, ToyCons.com, and VideoGameCons.com. An update made to FanCons.com is also made on the appropriate specialty sites and vice versa. (The exception is TrainShows.net. Those model railroading shows are in a completely separate database.)

I want to submit some really old cons from the 1980s. Do I still need a web site?
No. If you're submitting information for a convention that was around before web sites existed, you don't need to submit a web site URL. However, because a web site URL is required in the submission form, we suggest sending a link to some source of your information...like a link to a Fancyclopedia page, a link to a scan of a program guide, a link to The Internet Archive for cons that may have had a site long ago, or some other information that helps us to verify the data you're submitting. In order to keep our database as accurate as possible, we verify all submitted information...so any information you can provide is always helpful in aiding that verification. Old conventions are still required to have known dates and a known venue. We cannot list a convention if you only know that a it was in "October 1980" or if you only know the city and not the name of the hotel or other venue in that city where the convention took place.

If I want to list next year's con, do I submit a new one or update the dates on this year's con?
We keep convention history in our database, so please don't change the dates on the old convention. Submit a new convention listing with the dates and information for the new event.

Do you mind if I scrape your data for my own site?
Please don't do this! FanCons.ca is run by an unpaid volunteer staff who put in many hours each week to keep information updated, accurate, and current. We really don't want you disrespecting our work by taking information from our site en masse in order to populate your own convention schedule web site. We have some automated tools in place to detect automated scraping from bots and will block those bots from accessing our web site. Without revealing too much, we also have some detection methods in place which allow us to identify if someone has stolen a copy of our data and posted it elsewhere. If you insist on having a web site with a convention list, go look up the information on each convention yourself.

What if I want to scrape your data for some kind of statistical analysis?
You don't have to. If there's some kind of data analysis you want to do, please contact us and ask...especially if you're a reporting working on a story for a recognized press outlet. We have direct access to the mySQL database that powers FanCons.ca and can run some queries a lot easier than you'd be able to scrape data, import it, and perform your own analysis. We'd be happy to work with you to try and get the data you're looking for. ...and we may even have some of that data handy already.

Why don't you list online/virtual conventions?
We have a blog post that explains our decision in detail. If a convention was previously announced as being held in a physical location and changed to a virtual convention, we will mark it as Went Online-Only rather than Cancelled, but we will continue to list the original dates and venue.

Why can't I list a convention as a "pop culture" con?
When you think about it, every convention listed on this site is a "pop culture" convention. We feel it's redundant to categorize fan conventions as pop culture conventions. It would be like trying to categorize colleges as "educational" instead of liberal arts, vocational, or community colleges.

Our con has anime and comics and cosplay and fantasy and furries and horror and steampunk and everything! Why are you only listing a few?
Really? You REALLY have programming tracks with at least 6 hours of programming for each of these types? We usually only see this type of category spam when people are trying too hard to be everything to everyone. Just pick the primary focus or two of your convention. No conventions are really all of these things. Just because you have a vendor selling Funko Pops of anime characters doesn't make you an anime con. A couple people wearing fursuits does not make you a furry con. An artist selling stuff with gears on it does not make you a steampunk con.

What's the difference between "Gaming" and "Video Games"?
"Video Games" refers to games you play on a computer, phone, handheld gaming system, or a TV console system. "Gaming" is literally everything else...board games, Dungeons & Dragons, live action role playing, Magic: The Gathering, Pokemon card games, etc...

People sell video games at our con. Why won't you list it as a video gaming con?
We reserve the "Gaming" and "Video Games" convention types for cons where you can actually play the games. We don't want people looking for video game cons or gaming cons and expecting to show up to play some games and only finding vendors selling used Nintendo 64 cartridges. If you've just got vendors selling games, you're not actually a gaming con nor a video game con.

Why is there a 6 hour requirement for cons to be listed?
As explained above, we want to ensure the events in our database are actually conventions. By instituting a six hour minimum requirement, that eliminates most club meetings, cosplay gatherings, and film double-features that might be calling themselves a "con". However, we have been known to make some exceptions for library-run comic cons that have nice web sites and are only 5 hours long. Support your local library!

Why do you only list some of the guests at conventions?
We have thousands of guests in our guest database and are always adding more. Unfortunately, it's by no means a complete list...and unless a guest is in our database, we aren't able to list them as a guest at a con. At this time, we're busy adding more and more conventions and don't have the available time to also add every guest.

Why does it take so long for my submissions to be posted?
Every single submission we receive on FanCons.ca is reviewed by a human being. We verify that the information is correct before we update our database. Sometimes it takes a while to verify all the data and other times we may be receiving a number of submissions and simply need time to process them all...and sometimes real life gets in the way and we're not able to verify as much data as we normally would for a little while.

Why did someone who submitted an update after my update get theirs posted first?
Generally, older submissions get processed before newer submissions...first in, first out. However, we do tend to give more attention to some newer submissions in special cases. For example, a simple update like correcting the spelling of a venue or marking a convention as cancelled can be done very quickly so those tend to be done soon after we see them. We also prioritize updates for events that are coming up in the next month with the most attention given to any updates that are for conventions taking place this week. If you're submitting a large update for a convention that's more than 6 months away, please be patient...we'll get to you. (If you keep submitting updates for this convention every day, that won't get your update processed any faster.) If you submit an update for a convention that has passed, that may take longer since we need time to look back at older sources to verify the information is accurate. Also, submissions that add a lot of new guests who aren't already in our database can take quite a long time because we have to add pages for each guest.

Why is my convention name not in ALL CAPS with the tagline like I submitted?
We receive a lot of submissions for conventions with the convention name in ALL CAPS. We understand you've done this for some kind of marketing purposes, but honestly...it's annoying. Can you imagine if everyone had their convention names listed on this site in capital letters with their taglines like "YATTACON: A FAN-RUN ANIME CON FOR ALL". No. Just no. Be reasonable here. If your convention is a legitimate abbreviation like MTAC or FACTS, that's fine...but, similar to Wikipedia's Manual of Style, we don't accept capitalization for capitalization's sake.

Why is my convention listed with the year and not its number?
For consistency, our system was designed to always display conventions as "Convention Name" followed by "Year". We would not list a convention's 5th year as "YattaCon 5" and would instead list it as "YattaCon 2010". We also do not list taglines or suffixes as part of a convention's name such as a convention that might be called "YattaCon Extreme" one year and "YattaCon Baka" the next.

How can I update our logo on our listing?
Contact us and send us a link to the convention listing you want updated with a new logo image. We'll reply and you can reply back and attach the image. We accept GIF, JPEG, and PNG images. Sorry, we cannot use PDF, PSD, SVG, WebP, TIFF, or BMP images.

A convention said it was "postponed" until next year. Why did you mark it "Cancelled"?
Convention organizers have often used the terms "postponed" and "cancelled" interchangeably when a convention is not held in a particular year and will be held again. With a large number of cancellations and postponements happening starting in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we decided that FanCons.ca needed to follow a consistent standard for these terms no matter what term convention organizers may use.
The first thing to understand is that we do not delete convention listings. Once a con has been announced, it's in our database with those dates. We will modify the dates with a little wiggle room if the convention adds or removes days from their event, but we absolutely will not delete a convention that has previously been announced. If a convention cancels or postpones, we don't want people coming back to our site later and wondering where it went. We will mark it as either Cancelled or Postponed (or Went Online-Only) so people will know there's been a change. (Sometimes we'll even mark things as Likely Cancelled when it looks very much like a con has died, but we've got no official confirmation and they're not responding to inquiries.)
If a convention cancels their annual event and announces another event a few months later, we'll mark their original dates as "Postponed". If they don't have another event until around when their next event would have happened anyway, we consider that "Cancelled".
Let's say that YattaCon normally has a con on or around July 4th weekend...but they can't have it this year for some reason. They announced that "YattaCon has been postponed until next year". We'll mark this year's event as "Cancelled" even though they said "postponed"...because this year's event really is cancelled and is not happening. Now let's say that YattaCon's July 4th event has been "postponed until June of next year" and they still plan to have their July event for some reason. We'd consider that to be postponed because there's still two events and this year's event was just delayed.
For another example, let's say that YattaCon normally happens every 4 months. If they announced "YattaCon Spring in April has been postponed until July" and they were going to have a "YattaCon Summer" event in July anyway, we'd mark YattaCon Spring as cancelled.
Basically, when a con is "postponed", the con is still planning the same number of events, but the scheduling has moved. When a con is "cancelled", there's an event that's just not going to happen and they're moving on to the next one. Being marked "Cancelled" does not necessarily mean that a convention will never be held again.

How do I become a curator on FanCons.ca?
Keep submitting updates. Submit new conventions, submit convention updates, and submit guest updates. If we see a consistent pattern of updates from you that we verify are almost always accurate, we'll notice and may invite you to apply as a FansCons.com Curator. Some curators specialize in a particular type of convention (such as video game cons) or a particular region (such as UK cons) and that's perfectly fine! Unfortunately, since FanCons.ca makes only enough money from banner advertising to cover the server hosting and other expenses, this is purely unpaid volunteer work. If you are currently staff for a convention, we will ask you to disclose that in your application. You'd be able to update the convention that you staff, but if you're only updating that con and not updating many others (or worse, making a competitor con seem less appealing), your access would be revoked.