Editorial standard

How We Recommend

Basement Dispatch / sourced, not sponsored

Shanghai Rave Index is a selective guide, not a full nightlife feed. The goal is to make every listing traceable enough to save, share, and question.

Selection Listings are filtered for source quality, sound fit, room signal, and calendar usefulness.
Evidence Event pages keep source links, source layers, last-checked dates, and watchlist warnings visible.
Disclosure Commercial relationships must be labeled and cannot silently change editorial judgment.

Selection Standards

We do not try to list everything happening in Shanghai. We prioritize entries that help a reader decide whether a night is worth planning around.

  • Sound fit: techno, rave, industrial, bass, house, trance, experimental club, live electronic, and adjacent underground scenes.
  • Room fit: credible venues, crews, labels, promoters, sound systems, late rooms, and community signals.
  • Planning value: clear date, time, venue, price, age or ID notes, ticket path, and route context.
  • Risk signal: unclear source, missing ticket path, app-only details, TBA lineup, or unconfirmed watchlist leads are labeled instead of hidden.

Source Layers

Source labels are not decoration. They tell readers how much weight to put on a listing before buying tickets or travelling.

  • Official: venue, promoter, ticketing platform, artist, label, or public municipal source.
  • Secondary: Resident Advisor, SmartShanghai, venue guide, or another public listing that still needs final event-page confirmation.
  • Social lead: public social post, poster, story capture, or profile link that is useful but can change quickly.
  • Context source: artist profiles, previous editions, venue pages, off-city festival pages, and social index previews can explain a lead, but they do not count as a second confirmation for the current event.
  • Watchlist: visible lead with incomplete date, ticket, lineup, or source evidence. These pages stay noindexed until stronger evidence lands.

Verification Methods

For dynamic or anti-scrape platforms, we verify with a browser view and avoid treating automated fetch failures as facts.

  • Platform search first: on Xiaohongshu / XHS, Instagram, WeChat-style mirrors, and ticketing surfaces, we try platform search, official account pages, or visible results before opening deep links.
  • Browser / Chrome checks: source notes may record whether the browser confirmed an event title, date, venue, lineup, ticket state, or only profile-level context.
  • Login boundaries: if a public post requires logged-in Chrome, we ask for login-assisted viewing and do not enter credentials, bypass login walls, or mark the source confirmed just because a profile exists.
  • No bulk probing: we avoid repeated direct loads, guessed URL grids, and scraping patterns that can trigger anti-bot warnings or create unreliable evidence.

Corrections

Nightlife information moves. A correction is not a failure if the update trail is visible.

  • Send corrections, missing sources, lineup changes, cancelled events, or safety concerns through RED / Xiaohongshu ID 980793145.
  • Useful corrections include a source URL, screenshot reference, venue or promoter name, event date, and what changed.
  • When a correction affects planning, we update the page, source label, watchlist status, or ticket language.
  • We keep uncertainty visible instead of rewriting uncertain leads as confirmed events.
admin