Crown the first ninety minutes What this site is
The first ninety minutes /Arriving, and checking where you are
15

Arriving, and checking where you are

Position
After you have an address, before any account exists
Pages in this phase
Four
Honest span
Two minutes, or twenty five if the first screen confuses you

The moment the address goes in is the first point in the run where something happens that you did not cause. Very often the first screen is not a market at all, and knowing that in advance is most of this phase.

Where minute 15 sits in the whole run

Crown market addresses

crownm5jmtbhqnoxhexx7nyiygqgqofp3wnjyyfl74gziohqqy6oq5id.onion
crownrywlm7mnohkzntlir2tlhafq6tzphgqyag5cw5en7nprchfklad.onion
crownwpaimgizxylrvrh4u6acpvk4l757cfla7xs6zjki7tdjqbnv6qd.onion

Published exactly as supplied. Nothing on this site is monitored, tested or checked, so no address here is claimed to be working. What a copied address does and does not settle.

What actually happens in this phase

You paste the address, the browser thinks for longer than a normal site would, and then one of a small number of things appears. Only one of them is the market.

You may get a holding page that says you are in a queue and will be moved along shortly. You may get a wall with a puzzle on it that has to be solved before anything else is shown. You may get a page that loads slowly and incompletely. You may get nothing at all, which has its own page at the end of this phase.

None of those is a sign that you have the wrong address, and all of them get read that way by somebody arriving for the first time. That misreading is what sends people back to a search box, and going back to a search box in mild frustration is the most reliable route to a bad address in the whole run.

The four pages here

aThe queue and the wallThe holding page and the puzzle that come before the market.6 minbReading the address bar properlyThe only screen in this phase that carries information.4 mincWhat a first screen cannot tell youPolish is not evidence, and neither is roughness.5 mindWhen nothing loads at allA blank page, a timeout, and what each one narrows down.7 min

The check that belongs in this phase

Before anything is typed, the string in the browser bar is compared against the string you meant to use. Not the first few characters, the whole thing, and the last ten in particular. This takes a few seconds and it is the only moment in the run where a substituted address can still be caught for free.

After this phase the cost of that mistake climbs steeply. At minute 25 you have given a name and a password to whatever is on the other end. At minute 45 you have sent it money. The check is cheap here and expensive to have skipped later, which is the general shape of this whole timeline.

Where people stall

The classic stall is the queue page. It says a wait is expected, gives a figure, and asks you not to refresh. People refresh. Refreshing frequently puts you back at the start of whatever ordering is happening, so the page that was going to clear in a minute now takes five.

The second stall is the puzzle wall, which is often deliberately awkward. Two failed attempts and a reader starts to suspect they are on a fake page, because a genuine one surely would not be this annoying. Awkwardness is not evidence either way.

The third and worst is abandoning a correct address because the first screen was strange, then finding a replacement in a hurry. Nothing about a queue or a wall tells you anything about whether the address is right. The address bar tells you that, and only the address bar.

How long this really takes
What people expectA few seconds, like opening any site
What it usually costsTwo minutes on a good day, twenty five if the first screen is a wall and you fight it

The variation here is almost entirely about queues and puzzles rather than about the network. A page that loads and then makes you wait is common and it is not a fault.

What you should have leaving this phase

  1. A page in front of you that you have identified as either the market, a queue, a wall or a failure.
  2. The address in the bar compared, character by character at both ends, against the one you meant to open.
  3. No credentials typed anywhere yet. Nothing in this phase requires them.
In one line

The first screen is often not the market, and that is normal. The only thing in this phase that carries real information is the string in the address bar.

Questions that come up here

A queue page appeared instead of the market. Is the address wrong?

It tells you nothing about the address. A holding page is a way of managing arrivals. Compare the address bar against your string, then wait without refreshing.

How long should I let a page sit before giving up?

Give it a couple of minutes of genuine loading. If it is a queue with a stated wait, honour the stated wait. Beyond that, try another address from your set rather than a new search.