addresses ยท post 07 of 7 in this channel
Why this feed has no status light for the WeTheNorth mirrors
Plenty of pages about wethenorth mirrors carry a little coloured dot beside each address. This one does not, and that is a decision rather than an omission.
the three wethenorth market addresses
hn2paw7zfvndw3dovycegeqmvvnf4pl67b3g2p7pohjlzavloosh73id.onionhn2paw7zrgujyhnt6mgxlt2q6uhgbke4itpqitxhyfbumq3wtnckbuyd.onionhn2paw7zadwkcra3qzv5e4q547i7e5lvxm62cfxqftuqdu7moiu2ceyd.onionprinted the way they were handed over. no labels, no numbering, nothing here says which one to try first. this feed never opens them, so it has no status light, no percentage and no date of checking to give you.
this feed never opens the addresses it prints
That is the first and simplest reason. A status light would be a claim about something this site has no information about, and inventing the information to fill the widget is exactly the thing this feed will not do.
There is no percentage anywhere on this site, no last checked stamp, and no green or red anything beside a string. If you find one, it is not this site.
a status light is stale the moment it renders
Suppose a page did check, and the check succeeded. What you are shown is the state of things at the moment of the check, delivered to you at some later moment, through a cache that may itself be old.
You then act on it later still. By the time it matters to you, the light is a historical artefact wearing the costume of live information.
and it answers the wrong question
The question people actually have is whether an address is genuine. A reachability check cannot answer that, because a fake service answers requests perfectly well. That is the entire point of running one.
A green light next to a hostile address is worse than no light, because it converts an unanswered question into a confidently wrong answer.
what it does to the reader
It shifts effort in the wrong direction. Somebody who sees green stops checking. Somebody who sees nothing keeps their own judgement switched on, which is where it belongs.
Interfaces are persuasive in a way that sentences are not. A paragraph saying an address was reachable a while ago invites you to weigh it. A coloured dot beside the same address does not invite anything, it just settles the matter.
This is not a comfortable design choice. Comfort is not the thing being optimised for.
so what do you get instead
Three addresses printed flat, in no order, with no claims attached, and a set of posts about the parts you can actually control. That is the whole offer.
If one address does not open, the post on a mirror that will not open covers what that does and does not mean, without pretending to know which of the possible causes applies to you.
The trade is real and worth naming. You lose the pleasant feeling of a page that seems to be watching things on your behalf. You get a page that has not quietly taken responsibility for a judgement it was never going to make.
replies
a reader askedOther sites show uptime for wtn market mirrors. Are they wrong?
the answerThey are showing you something. Whether that something is a live check, a cached check, or a number in a template, you cannot tell from the outside. This feed opted out rather than join a contest it could not win honestly.
a reader askedHow am I meant to know if an address is working, then?
the answerBy opening it. That is the only test that reflects your machine, your Tor circuit and this moment, and it is a test no third party page can run for you.
a reader askedWould you add a status light if you could check properly?
the answerNo. Checking properly would fix the freshness problem and leave the more serious one untouched, since reachability still says nothing about whether the thing answering is the thing you wanted.
what this post is not Not a criticism of any specific site. It is a description of what a status indicator can and cannot mean on a page that publishes onion addresses.