Short editor notes about the Mars Market rotation, reader behaviour and decisions the directory has taken. There is no fixed schedule. Notes are dropped here when the editor team thinks the underlying point is worth recording, and removed when the point no longer applies.
The mirror list has been kept at five entries for the present rotation and the editor team has no plans to change that count. Each of the five lands on the same storefront, so the count is a reliability cushion rather than a choice for the reader. When an entry is rotated out, a fresh one takes its place before the older one disappears, keeping the working set at the same size on most days.
A Tor route that felt instant last week can crawl tonight. The recommended response on the directory side has not changed — try the next entry on the mirrors page rather than waiting for the first to resolve. Each entry sits on a different point of the network and the Tor Browser builds a separate route for each, so a slow first attempt does not predict the second.
Earlier drafts of the directory carried small status indicators next to each entry. They were removed on purpose. A clearnet page cannot honestly report on the live state of an onion service in real time, and giving the impression that it can would mislead readers who depend on the page to enter the storefront. The directory now publishes addresses and prose, nothing else.
Readers who arrive looking for the storefront tend to copy the first line they see and paste it into a non-Tor browser. The editor team has reworked the surrounding copy several times to head off that habit, since the page itself works in any browser but the addresses do not. The current phrasing on the mirrors page is the version that seems to do the best job of catching new readers before the mistake is made.