The online badge is about someone else’s trip
Every mirror page wants to show you a green dot. Here is the problem with a green dot next to a .onion, and what to do instead when you need to know if the market is reachable.
What an uptime figure would actually be measuring
An uptime percentage beside an onion describes one machine on one circuit at a moment that has passed. Your circuit is built fresh when you click, so the number is about somebody else’s trip, not yours. The probe that produced it came from a different country, through a different path, at a different hour, and the market’s queue was a different length then. It is a fact, but it is a fact about their visit. The gap between their visit and yours is exactly the part you care about, and the number does not touch it.
What a green dot would be promising
A status light goes green when a checker’s request gets an answer, and red when it does not. That tells you the mirror answered a specific probe. It does not tell you that your circuit will build, that your entry node is not saturated, or that the queue will not hold you for ten minutes because it is 21:00 somewhere and half the market just logged in. The dot turns red on somebody else’s probe, not on yours, and it is equally wrong in both directions: red when your open would have worked, green when yours would have sat in the queue.
What a last-checked time would be telling you
When someone else looked, and what they saw at that instant. Two minutes later the answer can be different, because the answer is not a property of the address. It is a property of the route you happen to get. A timestamp makes a moving target feel static, and that feeling is what people mistakingly file under \u201cthe market is down.\u201d
Open the address. The circuit builds, or it does not. The queue appears, or it does not. That is the status, measured on your trip, at your moment, on your route, and it is also the only measurement you can do anything about: if it fails, the fix list is written for exactly those outcomes.
So how do you know the market is up?
Three things, in decreasing order of usefulness. First, your own open: it worked, you are in, done. Second, the address itself: if it still passes the five checks, it is a live candidate, and a mirror that passes the checks but will not load for you is a circuit problem, not a market problem, nine times out of ten. Third, other people, in the market’s own channels: when a rotation or a real outage happens, that is where it shows up first, not on any badge. A mirror can be perfectly alive and unreachable from your side of the network at the same time, and only you can tell which is which.
When people say “the market is down”
Ask which one they mean, because there are three different events wearing that phrase: the market is actually down (rare, announced, everyone says the same thing at the same time), one mirror is down (open one of the other two), and the person’s circuit is down (the fix list, ten minutes, your own machine). The first two have addresses that help. The third has a checklist that helps. Both are below, both are free.