How these session times are collected

We use the Google Places API to discover roller skating rinks across the United States, and to get two things from each result: the business name and address, and the address of the rink’s own website. That is the entire role Google plays in this site. We store the Places identifier so a rink can be matched reliably across refreshes.

We do not publish Google ratings, review counts, or review text. Not on a page, not in the structured data, not in a meta description. That data belongs to the platform that collected it, and it is not the fact this site is about.

We open the rink’s own website, find the page where it publishes its public session times, and read the times off it. Every session on this site traces back to a page the rink itself published, and every listing links to the exact page we read.

The reading step is automated and uses a language model, with one hard boundary: the model is only ever allowed to turn text the rink already published into fields, which are the day, start time, end time, session name and price. It is never allowed to write a sentence that appears on this site. There is no generated description of any rink anywhere here, which is why a listing page is short. A rink’s page contains its name, where it is, how to reach it, and its schedule, because that is what we actually know.

Only a rink with a readable published schedule. If we cannot find session times on a rink’s own site, that rink gets a row on its state page with its name, city, phone and a link out to its website, and no page of its own.

This is deliberate and it is the rule we are least willing to bend. A page that exists to say “times not yet confirmed” wastes the trip of everyone who lands on it. Right now 341 of the 437 rinks we know about are in that category.

Every schedule is re-read once a week. Each listing shows the date it was last checked, in full, next to a link to the source. If a rink’s schedule cannot be re-verified for thirty days, its page keeps the last times we read but puts them under a dated warning, and the page leaves our sitemap until it can be verified again.

Dated data with a warning on it is honest. An empty box is not, so we do not publish one.

States are opened in stages rather than all at once. A rink outside the current stage is fully built and reachable, and is simply not submitted to search engines yet. It costs a rink nothing and it means we can verify a small set properly before widening.

If something here is wrong, tell us and we will re-read the source. Corrections jump the weekly queue.