Why status badges beside an onion mean nothing

Almost every page that publishes onion addresses decorates them with something: a green dot, a percentage, a timestamp, a badge. None of those survive a moment of thought, and this page explains why, so you stop reading them as evidence.

A green dot is a claim about somebody else's moment

When a page shows an address as online, it is telling you that a machine somewhere reached that address at some point in the recent past, over a circuit that is not yours. Tor does not work like a road with fixed traffic. Your route is built fresh, through different relays, and it can fail while somebody else's succeeds at the same second. The dot was never about you.

It also ages badly. A page that checks every ten minutes is wrong for up to ten minutes at a time, and a page that checked once and cached the answer is wrong indefinitely. You have no way to tell which kind you are looking at.

An uptime percentage is a number without a denominator

Ninety-nine point four percent of what, measured from where, over which window, counting which failures? A timeout on a slow circuit is not the same as a service that has gone. Every published figure quietly collapses those into one number, and the collapsing is where the meaning leaks out.

Ask yourself what would have to be true for the figure to be checkable. Almost always the answer is that you would need the raw log, and the raw log is never published.

A last-checked timestamp tells you about the page, not the address

It says somebody looked. It does not say what they saw, whether they were on a working circuit, or whether the address changed in the hours since. A fresh timestamp on stale information is worse than no timestamp, because it buys confidence it has not earned.

What actually tells you something

Open the address in Tor Browser and see what happens. That is not a workaround for the absence of a badge; it is the only measurement that is about you, on your circuit, right now. Everything else is somebody else's reading, reported second-hand.

If it does not load, try the next address in the set before concluding anything. If none of them load from several different networks over a few hours, that is a real signal, and it is one you gathered yourself.

The check that matters more than any of this

Whether an address answers is a smaller question than whether it is the right address. A wrong onion can answer instantly and cheerfully, present a login form, and take your password. No status indicator anywhere would have warned you, because the address was up the whole time.

So compare the string. Character by character, first characters and last, against a source you did not get from the same place. That comparison is worth more than every badge on every directory put together.