Questions
Questions and answers
The questions that come up about the site itself rather than about any one habit. Several of the answers are refusals, and those are the ones worth reading first.
A questions page usually exists to reassure people. This one exists mostly to be specific about limits, because the useful thing to know about any reference site is the shape of the hole in it. If you want the shape of an individual page instead, that is on how a page is built.
What the site is
It is a reading site about ordinary internet habits and what those habits do in an unusual place. It is written by people with no connection to Mars Market or to any market. It has no relationship with anybody who runs anything, it takes no money from anybody, and it has nothing to sell. There is no account system, no form, no comment box and no way to contact anybody through it, which is a limitation and is stated as one.
It publishes three addresses because they were supplied, and it says as little about them as it can while still being useful. That is covered on the addresses page in more detail than most readers will want.
What it cannot do
- It cannot reach an account, a balance, an order or a message, and no page here has ever been able to.
- It cannot tell you whether an address opens, because it never opens one.
- It cannot recover anything for anybody, and it has no way of putting you in touch with anybody who can.
- It cannot tell you whether something you are looking at is genuine. Nothing on a clearnet page can settle that.
That list matters because the gap it describes is exactly the gap other people offer to fill. A page that promises to check, restore, recover or verify on your behalf is describing a service that the medium does not support, and the confidence is the tell.
About the writing
There are no bylines because there is nobody to name. There are no dates on individual pages beyond the date the pages last changed, which is generated from the files themselves rather than typed in. There are no quotations, no case studies and no anecdotes about named people, because none were collected and inventing them would be the easiest way to make the site untrustworthy.
Where a page describes what a piece of software does, it describes the common default behaviour rather than a specific version, because defaults change and a version number printed today is wrong within months. Anywhere a page says something behaves in a particular way, the honest reading is "on most setups, at the time of writing", and readers should check their own settings rather than take a page's word for it.
The questions themselves
Is this site connected to Mars Market?
No. It is not the market, it is not written by anybody involved with the market, and it has no channel to anyone who is. It cannot pass a message, resolve a problem or speak for anybody.
Why will you not say whether an address is working?
Because the site never opens one, so it has nothing to report. That is a deliberate choice rather than a missing feature. A clearnet page reporting on a hidden service is reporting on something it saw at some earlier moment, and readers reasonably treat such a report as current when it is not.
Something went wrong and I lost money. Can you help?
No, and nobody who contacts you offering to can either. There is no channel from this site to anybody, no recovery service anywhere that this site knows to be real, and the confident offer of help is a common shape of a second loss.
Why is there no forum, comment section or contact form?
Because each of those collects things about the people who use it, and because a site with no way to be contacted cannot be socially engineered through its inbox. It also means the site cannot answer questions, which is a real cost and is not being pretended away.
Do you use analytics or cookies?
No. There is no analytics script, no tag, no pixel, no cookie and no third party request of any kind. Every file the page loads comes from this host, which you can check in a browser's network panel in about ten seconds.
Can I reuse the text?
The site would rather people read it here, but there is nothing to enforce and no interest in arguing about it. If the ideas are useful somewhere else, take them and write them in your own words, which will suit your readers better anyway.