How your event got on Festro

If you found your event on Festro and you never posted it here, this page explains how it got here and what you can do about it. Nothing is hidden and nothing is locked. You can claim the listing, correct it, or have it taken down — and a removal request is honoured within 24 hours.

Festro is building one place to see what is happening in Montréal at night. To make that useful on day one, we list public facts about events — what is on, when, where, roughly what it costs — and we send every ticket click to whoever is actually selling the ticket. We are not a ticket reseller for these listings and we take no cut of them.

Every listing on Festro that you did not create yourself carries an “Unclaimed listing” label, the name of the source it came from, and the date we last checked it. If you tap the source name you land on the original page. The sources we use are:

• Ville de Montréal open data — the City's public événements publics dataset, published under a Creative Commons BY 4.0 licence.
• Official ticketing APIs — Ticketmaster's Discovery API and similar programs we are licensed to use.
• Your own website or calendar feed — if your venue or collective publishes its events publicly (an iCal feed, an events page, a structured listing), we read the same page any visitor or search engine reads.
• Organizers themselves — anything submitted by a verified organizer who runs their events on Festro.

We do not take listings from platforms whose terms tell us not to, we do not use anyone's account or password to read anything, and we do not attempt to get around a login wall, a paywall, or any technical measure. We only read pages that are open to the public.

For an unclaimed listing we show the facts: event title, date and time, venue and address, price range, category, and a link back to the source. That is it.

We do not copy your poster artwork or your written description from your website. Where a listing has no image we license, Festro generates its own plain cover from the event's colours — so nothing of yours is republished. Posters appear only where the source licenses them to us (an official ticketing API) or where the organizer has claimed the listing and uploaded their own.

If a listing is wrong — a moved date, a cancelled show, a venue that closed — that is worth telling us about, and section 5 is how. Stale information helps nobody, least of all you.

An unclaimed listing cannot sell a ticket on Festro. This is not a policy we could quietly change — it is how the product is built. The only call to action on an unclaimed listing is an outbound link to whoever is already selling: your own site, your ticketing platform, the door. We take no fee, no commission, and no data from that sale.

Native ticketing on Festro only ever unlocks after you claim your organizer profile and choose to turn it on. See the Organizer payments agreement for what that involves.

Three doors, and you can walk back out of any of them:

• Claim it — take ownership of the listing and the organizer profile attached to it. You then control the text, the images and the dates, and re-checks stop overwriting your edits. Claiming is free and does not commit you to selling tickets through Festro.
• Correct it — tell us what is wrong and we fix it. No account needed.
• Remove it — we take the listing down and we do not put it back. Removal is permanent: we record the event so that a later re-check of the same source cannot recreate it.

To correct or remove something, use the correction and removal page. We action removal requests within 24 hours and reply to tell you it is done. You do not need to explain yourself, retain a lawyer, or prove harm — asking is enough.

When we read a venue or organizer website directly, we do it with an identified crawler that obeys that site's `robots.txt` file. It announces itself as FestroBot, it fetches slowly, and it never executes scripts, submits forms, or solves challenges. If a site's `robots.txt` tells FestroBot not to read a page, we do not read it — and if we cannot reach the `robots.txt` file at all, we treat that as a “no”.

The full technical details, including exactly how to block us, are on the FestroBot crawler page.

Public event facts are not personal information. But an organizer can be an individual, and event billing routinely names real people — so we treat organizer names, contact emails and performer names as personal information under Québec's Law 25, keep them factual and minimal, and honour deletion requests. Our full Privacy policy covers this, and a performer named in a listing can ask for removal on the same terms as anyone else.

Festro is a small Montréal team, not a support-ticket machine. Write to us through our contact form and a human answers. If you would rather have your listing gone than discuss it, that is a completely acceptable answer and we will not argue with it — ask us to remove it and it is done.