Short editor notes about the Mars Market rotation, reader behaviour and decisions the directory has taken. Dropped here when the underlying point is worth recording, removed when the point no longer applies.
The rotation stayed at five entries through all of July with no new address published and no retirement. Two of the five had brief slow spells in the second week, the kind of pattern that used to be worth noting but is now common enough that readers seem to expect it. The editor team has stopped writing per-incident notes for these because the storefront kept serving fine on the other three lines during each spell.
The mirror list has been at five entries all through spring and early summer of 2026 and the operator has given no signal of shrinking or growing the set. 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 falls off.
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 one to resolve. Each entry sits on a different point of the network and Tor Browser builds a separate circuit for each, so a slow first attempt does not predict the second.
Earlier drafts of this directory carried small status dots 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 use the page to reach the storefront. The directory now publishes addresses and prose, nothing else.
Readers who arrive looking for the storefront tend to copy the first onion 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 seems to catch new readers before that mistake is made.