The first-time approach out of a forum thread

A forum thread is not a good place to find an onion address, but it is a very common place to find one. This is the first-time approach when the thread is where you start.

The thread I actually read

The thread was in a general privacy forum, not a market forum. Somebody had asked whether nexus market had a working link. There were sixty-eight replies. Most of them were people asking the same question again, five had addresses in them, two had addresses that were clearly fake, and one had a screenshot of the front page with the login box blurred out.

I opened the thread in a normal browser first, because I wanted to read it before I typed anything into Tor. Reading a thread in a normal browser is fine. Clicking an onion link from a normal browser is not; the browser does not know what to do with it and either does nothing or hands it to something else.

Once I had read the thread twice, I put it aside and opened Tor Browser fresh. From this point on, none of the forum's links were the things I trusted.

How I picked between the addresses in the thread

Five addresses in the thread. That is five candidates, which sounds hard, but it is not. I did the thing every first-time approach eventually has to do: I found a second, unrelated source, and I looked at where the two agreed.

The second source was this site, which lists three addresses at the top of every article. Two of the five in the thread matched two of the three here. The other three did not match anything. That gave me two candidates and three to ignore.

The reason to ignore three obvious candidates from a busy thread is that a busy thread is a place people advertise. If somebody posts an address that no other independent source knows, the burden of proof is on that address, not on me.

The addresses block at the top of this article

The three nexus market addresses are at the top of this article, in the addresses block. They are not in any order and they are not ranked. On a first-time approach from a forum thread, use the addresses block as your independent second source, and use the thread only to remind yourself which one your fellow readers were finding useful most recently.

A first-time approach can end at the addresses block. The rest of the article is only what comes after that.

Copying the string and looking at it once

I copied the whole onion, from http:// to .onion, using the copy button. Then I did an unglamorous but useful thing: I pasted it into a note, and looked at the first six characters and the last six characters. Nexus onions start with nexus, which is easy to check by eye. The last six are less memorable, so I checked them against the addresses block on this page.

This is not verification with a capital V. It is a quick sanity check to catch the case where I copied only half the address, or where the clipboard has an old string in it from something else.

Pasting into Tor Browser

Tor Browser opened on the default page, which is a small search box and a friendly reminder that everything is a bit slower here. I pasted the onion into the address bar, hit enter, and waited. On the first-time approach, I found waiting was the main thing I had to learn to do. A cold onion visit is not fast; the browser is quietly doing quite a lot to find the site through the network.

The page loaded. It looked like a normal market front page. No pop-ups, no ads. A captcha in the middle and a login area lower down. I did not log in.

What I did not do, and why

• I did not follow any other link from the forum thread. First-time approach means one destination, one address.
• I did not save the thread as a bookmark. The thread is a place to read once. It is not a place to keep as a link source.
• I did not sign up for the forum to reply and thank anyone. First-time visits are quiet; there is no need to announce myself.
• I did not screenshot the front page. If I ever want to compare what I saw, the address I visited is enough.

What was different from expecting

The thread had made the whole thing sound urgent, as forum threads do. In the end, the first-time approach was quiet: pick a nexus market address that two independent sources agree on, copy it, paste it, look at the page, close the tab. Nothing on the reader's side had to be dramatic.

The next time I opened Tor Browser, the address was in my history. That felt strange for a moment, and then it stopped feeling strange, because a browser knowing where you have been is what browsers do.

What this article is not. This is not a review of any forum, and not a claim that any of the three addresses is up right now.