The front door

The front page of a market is the part under permanent attack. That single fact explains most of what people find strange about it, including the parts they read as warning signs.

A shop on the ordinary web has a front page built to sell. It loads fast, it looks the same every visit, and if something breaks you see a friendly message. None of those goals apply here. The front of a wethenorth onion link is built to survive floods, absorb junk traffic and shed load before load reaches anything that matters. It is closer to a door with a queue outside than to a shop window.

These five entries take the signals people read at the door and say what each one is actually made of.

One thing worth saying twice

None of this is a claim that any address is reachable. This board runs no probes and shows no status of any kind. The addresses page prints three strings and stops there. Everything in this section is about how to interpret what your own browser tells you, which is the only live information you will ever have.

The door is not the market

Worth separating the two, because most confusion at this stage comes from treating them as one thing. The door is a small piece of infrastructure whose job is to absorb punishment. Everything you actually came for sits behind it. A door under strain behaves badly in ways that say nothing about the state of what is behind it, and a door that behaves perfectly says nothing either, since a copy of the door is trivially easy to build.

That cuts the useful information at this stage down to almost nothing. Your browser can tell you whether a route completed. It cannot tell you what you reached. Those are separate questions and only the first one has an answer visible from where you are standing.

Three questions when you cannot get in

1. Did anything answer at all. A page, even an unfriendly one, is a completely different situation from a timeout.
2. Does the second address behave the same way. Two addresses failing identically points at your side or at the network between you.
3. Have you changed anything. A new bridge, a different network, a browser update. Local changes are the most common cause and the last one anybody suspects.

Notice that none of those questions is answered by searching for a new address. Searching is the reflex, and it is the one action that converts a temporary routing problem into a permanent one, for the reasons set out in links and addresses.

A note on patience

The front door is slow, repetitive and occasionally humiliating. It is also the reason the platform behind it stays reachable at all under sustained attack. People who understand what the gate is doing find it much easier to sit through, and people who read every delay as a warning sign end up making decisions in a hurry at exactly the wrong moment.

• A slow page means a fake What latency on this network is made of, and what speed does not prove.
• The captcha is just a nuisance Why the annoying gate is the thing keeping the door open at all.
• The login screen looks the same every time Change at the door is the norm, which is inconvenient for everyone.
• An error means the market is gone Reading Tor error text as a layer diagnosis instead of a verdict.
• My browser settings carry over What resets between sessions, and why the convenient parts are the risky ones.