Alcohol references and the control that hides them
Radar lists restaurant offers, and a large share of those offers are happy hours. The app ships with a control that withholds every listing referencing alcohol, and that control is the reason Radar is rated for ages 13 and up rather than 18 and up. This page describes what the control does, precisely enough to be checked.
1. Summary
Drink deals are hidden until somebody states they are of legal drinking age. Nobody sees them before answering, the answer can be reversed at any time, and every way the question can fail — a fresh install, unreadable storage, an answer lost with the last launch — fails toward hiding. A person using Radar with the control in place is shown a food-only catalogue and does not encounter the drinks half of the product.
2. What Radar is
Radar is a listings app. It shows discounts and specials that restaurants are running nearby, with the time and the terms attached, and links out to the restaurant. It does not sell anything that is listed, does not process orders, does not deliver, and has no shopping cart. A listing that mentions a drink is an advertisement for a restaurant promotion, not a way to obtain one.
3. Why the question arises
Roughly four in five listings in the catalogue reference alcohol at any given time. That is a consequence of the subject matter rather than an editorial choice: happy hour is the most common form a restaurant discount takes, and a happy hour is a discount on a bar menu. An app carrying that many references, with no control over them, describes itself honestly as frequent rather than infrequent.
The control exists so that the frequency is a property of one audience rather than of the app. It is a real filter over the data, not a label.
4. The control
It is asked before anything is shown. On first launch the app presents the question ahead of the listings screen. The listings screen is not mounted, does not request anything, and does not paint underneath the question.
It is reversible. An adult who turned drink deals on can turn them off again at any time from the account screen, and the same switch is what a parent would use. Turning it off takes effect immediately rather than at the next launch: listings already held for offline use are keyed to the audience that requested them, so none of them can be handed back to the other audience.
It stays on the device. The answer is kept on the handset. It is never attached to a Radar account, never synchronised between devices, and never sent to our servers. A phone handed to a child is a different audience from the adult who owns the account, and an account-level flag would follow the adult’s answer onto the child’s handset. It is also the one preference in the app that says something about a person’s age, and Radar has no reason to hold that.
5. What happens before anyone answers
The unanswered state hides. That is true on the very first frame, before stored settings have been read; it is true if reading them fails; and it is true if the answer was lost, in which case the question is asked again and drinks stay hidden until it is. There is no path through the app in which an unanswered user is shown a drink listing, including the moments when something has gone wrong.
6. What the control withholds
With the control in place, a listing is withheld if any of the following is true.
- Its category is a happy hour. This is treated as a drink reference categorically rather than by wording, because a happy hour that names no specific drink is still advertising a discounted bar menu.
- The venue is a kind of place that exists to serve alcohol — a bar, pub, brewery, taproom, winery, distillery, tavern or similar. A food special at a bar is withheld.
- Any text a reader can see on the listing names a drink, or the vocabulary bars use to sell them, in the title, price, description, schedule, terms or restrictions.
- It is a chain listing and any one of its branches offers something matching the above. Filtering the parent while leaving the branches visible would defeat the purpose.
These rules are deliberately over-eager. A false positive hides a wing special from somebody who would have enjoyed it; a false negative shows a cocktail listing to a thirteen-year-old in an app that said it would not. Those costs are not symmetric, so every rule errs toward hiding.
7. How the filter is enforced
On the server, not in the interface. The withheld listings are removed before the response is assembled. They are not sent to the device and hidden there.
Counts and filters agree with it. Result totals, city lists and category filters are computed after the listings are withheld, so a hidden listing is not counted in a total and does not leave its category offered in a filter that would return nothing.
A direct link cannot reach one. Opening a link to a withheld listing — from a message, a search result, or something saved before the control was switched on — returns not found rather than the listing.
No screen has to remember. The filter is attached by the single function that makes listing requests, rather than by each screen passing a flag. A screen written tomorrow inherits it without anyone having to think about it.
8. What a filtered app looks like
It is a noticeably smaller app. Most of the catalogue is withheld, and a substantial number of the cities Radar covers have no food-only listings at all; those cities are not offered in the place picker, and their listing counts are not shown. What remains is a food deals app: two-for-one tacos, half-price wings, a lunch special, buck-a-shuck.
9. Age rating
Radar is rated for ages 13 and up. The rating reflects what a user with the app’s controls in place encounters, which is the food-only catalogue described above. Radar does not sell alcohol, take payment for it, arrange its delivery, or verify anyone’s identity or age beyond the in-app question described here; it is a listings app pointing at restaurants, and the legal responsibility for serving rests with those restaurants.
10. Contact
Questions about this page, or about anything described on it: support@weareten.ca. See also our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.