Vermont, Nebraska, South Dakota, & Delaware are verified

Four more states have been verified by a human: Vermont, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Delaware.

Each state had its own particular headache.

Vermont is full of markets that run two seasons in two different places — outdoors on a green from May through October, then indoors at a gym or a distillery through the winter. Norwich, Middlebury, Capital City. A single row with one address and one date range gets those markets wrong. They now carry both.

Nebraska was heavy with county fairs, and county fairs almost always run separate application tracks. The 4-H and open-class exhibit entry is not the same thing as a commercial vendor booth, and a maker who applies to the wrong one loses weeks. Where a fair has both, the listing says so. I left out fairs with no dedicated vendor page at all, on the assumption those booths go to commercial exhibitors rather than makers.

South Dakota had duplicates hiding in plain sight. Yankton Riverboat Days and the Yankton Summer Arts Festival are the same August weekend in the same park, but the arts show is juried and run by a different organization. Two names, one weekend, two different applications.

Delaware was the opposite problem: several markets share word-for-word identical descriptions because one operator runs all of them. Identical copy is not the same as identical information, and the shared text was missing the day and the hours for every one of them. A significant number of Delaware events didn't include basic vendor information or have any means of inquiring about the event online.

One thing worth saying plainly: verified means a person confirmed the event is real, is still running, and is where we say it is. It does not mean every field is full. Plenty of these listings still need a booth fee, an application deadline, or a start time, and we would rather leave a field empty than guess at it and send you somewhere on bad information.

I keep being surprised by the quality of event sites — horseshit, if I'm being honest. A shocking number of markets and fairs publish no vendor information at all, or have no vendor page in the first place. The ones that pull their applications down the day after the event are a category of their own.

Progress is being made. Slow, but steady.