How we collect events

How it works

1. Once a day, an automated job checks each approved source for new and updated events.
2. We prefer official APIs and published calendar feeds over reading a web page. Every source is checked against its robots.txt and terms of use before we enable it.
3. Events are normalised — dates converted to Central Time, venues matched to one of our destinations, categories mapped to ours.
4. Duplicates found across sources are merged into one entry rather than listed twice.
5. A classifier checks whether an event fits what Discover850 is for. Anything uncertain goes to a person to review.
6. We store a short summary and always link back to the organiser’s own page for the full details.
7. Once an event finishes it is archived automatically, so the calendar only shows what is still ahead.

What we publish — and what we don’t

Discover850 is a guide to fun things to do. We publish festivals, concerts and live music, food and drink events, farmers and makers markets, parades, art shows, craft fairs, car shows, fishing tournaments, beach and outdoor activities, family entertainment, comedy, theatre, sport and seasonal attractions.

We deliberately don’t list government or board meetings, political events, court proceedings, business networking, professional conferences or medical seminars, support groups, religious services, public hearings, legal workshops or internal organisational meetings. Nothing against them — they’re just not what someone looking for a good weekend is here for.

How we behave

• Our crawler identifies itself as Discover850Bot and links back to this page.
• We honour robots.txt, including any Crawl-delay, and we throttle requests.
• We never bypass logins, paywalls, CAPTCHAs or bot protection. If a site blocks automated access, we don’t use it.
• We store only a short excerpt, never a full article, and we always credit and link to the source.
• We don’t invent missing information. An event with no confirmed date or location doesn’t get published.
• If you run a source and would rather we didn’t include you, email us and we’ll remove it.

Current sources

• Alys Beach

  Public events API · last checked Sep 8

• Destination Panama City

  Public events API · last checked Sep 8

• Florida State University

  Public calendar feed · last checked Sep 8

• Mexico Beach

  Public calendar feed · last checked Sep 8

• Seaside, Florida

  Public events API · last checked Sep 8

• Ticketmaster (Panhandle venues)

  Official Ticketmaster Discovery API · last checked Sep 8

• University of West Florida

  Public calendar feed · last checked Sep 8

• Visit Panama City Beach

  Public calendar feed · last checked Sep 9

Sources we chose not to use

We looked at these and decided against automating them. Being explicit seems fairer than quietly crawling anyway.

• Apalachicola Bay Chamber

  BLOCKED BY ROBOTS. The endpoint works and returns ~356 events, but robots.

• Destin–Fort Walton Beach Tourism

  NOT AUTOMATABLE. The site sits behind a Cloudflare managed bot challenge — even robots.

• Visit Gulf County (Simpleview)

  CREDENTIALS REQUIRED for the Simpleview partner REST API (/includes/rest_v2/plugins_events_events_by_date/find/, returns 403 "Invalid credentials") that other Simpleview-run DMOs (this entry's base_url is a placeholder — Visit Gulf County's actual domain was not reachable to verify) would also use. Visit Panama City Beach's own listing was resolved without that API — see the "visit-panama-city-beach" source, which reads its sitemap + per-event JSON-LD instead.