In Force · Chicago

Method · In Force · Chicago

How a deal earns a light

The clock lights only what we can point at. Every clause below exists because breaking it would put something on the clock that nobody could check afterwards.

A neighborhood that stays dark is a neighborhood we have not verified. It is not a neighborhood with nothing happening, and this site never says it is.

§1How a light is kept#

A machine may confirm a claim and may withdraw a light. It may never publish one. The sweep reads one twelfth of the sources every two hours, so each page is rendered once a day. Two misses a day apart take the light down. A person quoting the page can hold it.

  1. A person reads the venue's own page and writes the window and the figures it prints.
  2. The page is captured. The bytes are hashed and kept.
  3. Every two hours a machine renders one twelfth of the sources, so each page is read once a day, and looks for those printed facts. A miss on the rendered page is tried again against the HTML as sent.
  4. If the facts are still there, last-checked moves forward. If they are missed on two separate days, the light is withdrawn, and the desk says so.
  5. A person may quote the page. The quote is run through the same check. It holds the light against an older miss; a miss recorded after it still counts.

§2The rules#

Seven, in the order a claim meets them. Each is a thing we refuse to do, and refusing is the whole product: anyone can list a happy hour, and the work is in what gets left off. Each is addressable as §2.n so it can be quoted against us.

  1. A deal is published only from a page the merchant wrote and controls, or a civic record.

    Their own domain, or their own page on a platform they run it through: a salon’s Booksy, a kitchen’s Toast. Never Yelp, Groupon, a listicle or a screenshot: those are a claim about a claim, and we would be a third.

  2. A deal with no readable time window cannot light.

    An offer that never ends can never go out of force, so it never goes in.

  3. A deal last confirmed more than 14 days ago cannot light.

    Age alone takes it dark. Nobody has to notice.

  4. A deal from a venue the city records as recently closed cannot light.

    The sweep checks the claim. This checks that the claimant still exists.

  5. A price is copied as a number from the text on the page.

    An offer with no printed figure is counted as unpriced, never assumed cheap.

  6. A machine may find a change. Only a person may publish one.

    The sweep never rewrites a claim. What it cannot confirm waits on the desk.

  7. A dark neighborhood means we have verified nothing there.

    It is never printed as zero, and never as a claim about the neighborhood.

§3What we keep#

Every published claim carries a source URL, the day we read it, the hash of the bytes we read, and the day a person last confirmed it. That is what makes a claim checkable a year later instead of a link that has quietly changed underneath.

Where a source refuses to be captured, we say so rather than implying we have evidence we do not have. The desk lists those, along with everything the last sweep could not confirm.

§4What the drawing is made of#

The map is not an illustration. Every line on it comes from a published record and is reproducible from one: the neighborhood outlines and the label positions from the city's community area boundaries, the river and the lake from the city's hydrography. A room's position comes from the city's business licence record, and a room with no sourced position is not drawn. It is counted, in words, under the map.

Until today the river was nine line segments somebody typed by eye. Measured against the city's record it ran as much as sixty drawing units off the real north branch. It is the second thing on that drawing to have been placed by looking rather than by reading, and both are now read.

The red is the city's. Chicago publishes Star Red #E4002B; this site uses it a shade under that, and only to mark something in force at this minute. Nothing is ever written in it or on it. Everything lit is the same mint: the clock, the counts, a place on the map. The water is blue because it is water, drawn from the city's own record. For one day in September the whole site was redrawn in the flag's three colours, chrome included. Every red mark spread into the warmer ground, so it came back. Saying which colour is the city's and which is ours matters here for the same reason the rest of this page exists.

§5If you have a source#

Send the URL. We fetch it. We do not take your word for it, which is the same rule we hold ourselves to.

If you run the venue, publish your own hours and we read them from you instead of from a page about you.