The wall in front of the door is theirs, and deliberate

The address opens and what appears is not the market. It is a check of some kind. A puzzle, a queue, a message asking you to wait, or a screen that simply refuses and asks you to come back.

This gets read as brokenness. It is the opposite. It is a working piece of infrastructure doing the job it was installed to do.

Why the wall exists

An onion service can be flooded cheaply. There is no upstream provider to absorb it and no ordinary filtering layer in front. The service either implements its own gate or falls over whenever somebody feels like pushing it.

The gate also serves a second purpose that matters more to the reader. A convincing copy of a market has to reproduce whatever the real one shows. A gate with its own behaviour is one more thing a copy has to get right, and copies are usually lazy.

Why fiddling makes it worse

• Requesting a new circuit repeatedly puts you back at the start of whatever rate limit you tripped.
• Lowering browser security settings changes nothing about a server side gate and costs you protection.
• Trying every address in the set in quick succession can look exactly like the behaviour the gate exists to stop.
• Reloading fast is the single most effective way to convince a rate limiter that you are the problem.

The pattern here is that the reader, trying to get past a gate, performs a very good imitation of the thing the gate was built to block.

What the wall does not tell you

It does not tell you the address is the right one. A gate is easy to imitate and imitating it is exactly what a hostile copy would do. Seeing a familiar looking check is not verification of anything, and treating it as reassurance is a mistake this site would rather you did not make.

It also does not tell you the market behind it is healthy. A gate can be up while what is behind it is not.

What follows from getting it right

You wait instead of reconfiguring. That sounds trivial and it is the whole benefit, because the reconfiguring is what turns a two minute delay into an evening. It also stops the reader from concluding that the address is dead and going out to find a replacement, which is the moment this whole subject gets dangerous.

One practical note that costs nothing. If a gate is refusing you, come back later rather than harder. Rate limits forget.

The gate is also where the mark lives

Worth mentioning because it is a small oddity of this particular market. The wall is what answers on the published addresses, so the wall is the only page most visitors ever see. The image used on the icons of this site was taken from that screen, because there is no other page to take it from without going further in.

That is a fact about how the service is arranged and it is not a recommendation. An icon proves nothing. It is a picture, it can be copied by anybody in a few seconds, and a hostile page displaying a familiar mark is displaying a file rather than an identity.

The general rule holds. Appearance is not evidence. The only thing that identifies an onion service is the address itself, character by character, and every other visual signal on the screen is decoration that somebody could reproduce.

• Back to the cases the market caused
• When the slowness really is the network
• The address list