What this site is, and is not

What it is

A written account of one first session with Crown Market, arranged in the order the minutes arrive rather than by topic. Nine phases, each with pages for the specific things that happen inside it, plus a small reference shelf.

The framing is a deliberate choice. Most writing on this subject is a topic index, which works if you already know the order things happen in. A first session is precisely the case where you do not, and a reader who can say roughly how far they got can find their page in seconds.

What it is not

• Not the market. No connection to it, no communication with it, no ability to act on any account.
• Not a monitor. It runs nothing against any address, keeps no log of what answered when, and shows no status of any kind.
• Not a shop. Nothing is for sale here and nothing is being promoted.
• Not funded by anybody. No advertising, no affiliate arrangements, no paid placement and no sponsorship.
• Not a review site. Despite the layout. See the ratings page for why that matters.

The addresses

Three onion addresses appear on the addresses page and in the sidebar of every page. They were supplied to this site and they are printed exactly as given, in the order given, with no labels and no numbering.

Nothing here opens them. There is no scheduled check, no response time recorded, no history kept and no availability figure calculated. That is a limitation and it is stated rather than hidden, because the alternative is a status indicator that looks measured and is not.

What it will never do

1. Claim an address is up, or print an uptime percentage, or stamp a page with a checking date.
2. Publish a rating, a score, a vote count or a review count of any kind.
3. Invent a statistic. Where a figure on this site is a judgement, the page says so in the text.
4. Carry advertising, affiliate links or paid placement.
5. Ask you for anything. There are no accounts, no forms, no comment boxes and no newsletter.
6. Set a cookie or run any tracking.

How to judge it

By the same test it applies to everything else. Ask what would have had to happen for a claim here to be true, and check whether the page tells you.

The claims on this site are mostly of one kind. This is what a screen looks like, this is where people get stuck, this is roughly how long it takes. Those are observations and judgements, not measurements, and they are written as such. Where this site does not know something, the useful thing is that it says so rather than filling the space.

On the writing

Every page is written to the same three questions. What actually happens in this phase. Where people stall inside it. How long it really takes against what a reader expects. Anything that does not answer one of those is not on the page.

The dates on these pages follow the last real edit to the underlying files rather than the day you happen to be reading. A page that claims to have been updated today, every day, is telling you something about its templating rather than about its content.