How we decide what goes on this site, where it comes from, and what we will and won’t do for money. Published so you can hold us to it.
Independence
We take no money from anyone we write about. No paid listings, no featured placement, no sponsored content, no affiliate links, no commission on bookings. We don’t sell tickets.
Nobody has ever paid us anything, and there is currently no mechanism by which they could.
If that changes, here is the rule we will hold to:
- Any commercial relationship will be labelled where you see it, not buried in a policy page.
- Rankings are never for sale. Not the “best for” awards, not the order of anything, not a mention.
- Facts are verified the same way regardless of who pays. A paying venue gets the same scrutiny, the same “not published” where they don’t publish, and the same honest description of who they don’t suit.
- We will say so here, and before it happens, not afterwards.
We publish this now, with no revenue, precisely because it’s easy to promise when there’s nothing at stake and hard to keep when there is. Holding us to it later is the point.
Sourcing
Venue facts come from that venue’s own public website. Their events page, FAQ, code of conduct, entry conditions. That’s it.
We do not publish:
- Rumour, or things “everyone knows”
- Forum or social media claims about a venue
- Details a member or attendee has told us privately
- Anything we can’t point at a source for
Where we can’t verify something, we say so — in the text, on the page, rather than quietly omitting it. You’ll see phrases like “not published”, “check the venue’s site”, or an explicit note that a venue’s site blocked us. Those aren’t filler; they’re the honest state of our knowledge.
Where a venue chooses not to publish something, we respect that. Several release their address only on a purchased ticket. We report that, rather than sourcing it elsewhere.
We date what we check. Pages whose value depends on being current carry the date we last verified them, and the site flags its own listings as overdue if they haven’t been refreshed on schedule.
Ratings and rankings
We don’t publish star ratings or scores. A number we invented would be unverifiable and meaningless, and we can’t audit what happens inside a venue on a given night.
What we publish instead are “best for” judgements against stated, published criteria, where every judgement traces to something the venue says about itself.
We deliberately don’t rank venues on safety or consent culture. Ranking one operator “best” on consent necessarily implies the others are worse at protecting people, and that’s not something we can responsibly assert from published documents. We report what each venue publishes and let readers compare.
Corrections
A correction from a venue outranks anything we’ve inferred. Tell us and we fix it, quickly, without argument.
Any venue can ask to be removed from the site entirely, and we’ll do it without conditions.
Readers can flag errors too, and we’d rather hear about it than not: hello@swingershub.com.au.
What we publish about people
No photographs of attendees. No member directories. No profiles. No names.
This site carries no explicit imagery and no photography of people at venues. That’s a permanent editorial position, not a phase.
We’re written anonymously — by a Melbourne local in the scene — for the same reason our readers value discretion. We don’t publish our own name, and we don’t publish anyone else’s.
Guides and advice
Our guides are written from within the scene, not by clinicians, lawyers or therapists. Where a subject touches health, consent or wellbeing we say plainly that it’s general information rather than professional advice, and point to services that are.
We describe consent norms as they’re published and practised. We don’t soften them, and we don’t present a venue’s stated policy as a guarantee of what happens on the floor.
Accuracy, and being wrong
We’ve been wrong already, and we’ll be wrong again. When we’ve found errors, we’ve corrected the page and said what changed rather than quietly editing.
The most common failure in this category is staleness — a listing that was true last month presented as current. It’s the thing we’ve built the most safeguards against, and the thing most likely to catch us out. If you spot it, tell us.
Commercial disclosure
Current commercial relationships: none.
No advertiser, no sponsor, no affiliate, no venue, no platform. If that ever changes this section is where it will be listed, and it will be dated.
Last reviewed: August 2026. See also: about this guide, information for venues, and our privacy policy.