Sheet TG-07-B / SURVEY
Survey Methods on the Tor Guide Desk
Methods, not uptime. Dates, not lamps.
A survey on this tor guide is a limit, not a boast. The host is HTTPS paper. It can copy a circulating v3 string, mount an operator-provided capture, and write 8 September 2026 on the card. It cannot sit inside escrow, watch dispute logs, or honestly run a lamp that claims a hidden service is reachable at this hour.
What gets filed is public HTML, identifiers already moving through 2026 talk, and the difference between a signed operator note and a theme that can be cloned in an afternoon. Rumour is labeled rumour. Uptime gossip is labeled weather.
Readers who need a live directory will find the sheet barren. That barrenness is the method: a pressed record instead of a crawl of inventories.
I. How this tor field guide surveys a plot
Pretending to survey from inside a market would be a habitat lie. TG-07 therefore stops at documents a stranger could also fetch. Character length of a cited string can be checked. The date on the card can be checked. Whether a listing grid is honest cannot be checked from cream stock, and this tor field guide will not invent an audit it did not perform.
Dates are load-bearing. A string without a day is folklore with better kerning. The station writes the typesetting day and expects later readers to be slightly suspicious of the paper — suspicion is the correct feeling toward any overlay that has had time to age. Aging is not a defect in a methods card; it is how a methods card stays distinguishable from a fake live feed.
Plots appear because they are discussed, not because inclusion is a certificate. The diamond plate and AUTH ink on some composites are stationery jokes aimed at phishing kits that love crests. PGP is the instrument that is not a joke. See stamp notes if a drawn seal still looks like a ceremony.
II. Onion itinerary for a survey day
A practical onion itinerary for a survey day is short and unromantic: obtain Tor Browser from the Tor Project with published signatures, refuse plot-themed installers and 'helpers,' and treat every new string as hostile until a prior trusted key says otherwise. That is kit hygiene. It is not a purchase path and it is not a connect tutorial.
Search snippets shade the ground. They are not soil. Affiliate copy reaches for official and connect-now because those words move tired people. Survey language uses sighted, cited, and unverified because those words describe what the desk actually did. When two captured interfaces share a palette, that is fashion. Fashion is not kinship between keys.
The transect notes describe walking a query as a line: mark the canopy, skip souvenir stalls, press one voucher. Collecting seven names in an hour is a binge, and binges miss the middle of strings — which is where homoglyphs live. One compared specimen is a survey. A basket of uncompared names is a souvenir tin.
III. Station notes on what a survey refuses
The survey also names refusals so they cannot sneak back in as 'completeness.' Vendor tables, price grids, coupon rhetoric, and any sentence that walks an order belong to other kinds of page. This sheet will look incomplete to someone who wanted a catalogue. Completeness of that kind is a product.
Ads are not vouchers. A tor guide methods card cannot rescue a paste from a banner; it can only say, in slower language than a banner, that banners are canopy. If two sightings disagree, the later date does not automatically win. The signed note wins. If there is no signed note, you have disagreement, not a verdict.
Inclusion of a plot on the plots index means the name was discussed in 2026 public talk. It does not mean the station probed reachability, endorsed an operator, or saw stock. People who need those claims need a different document, and this desk does not write those.
IV. Survey questions filed on the methods card
What does a survey sheet actually verify?
Length of cited strings, the difference between a photograph and a key, and the date on the card. It does not verify listings, stock, escrow internals, or operator intent.
Why is there no live status lamp?
Because a cream page cannot honestly claim real-time reachability of a hidden service. Temporary mirror weather is not a station measurement. Write the date and move on. Lamps on clearnet research hosts are usually props.
Is inclusion of a plot an endorsement?
No. Inclusion means the name circulated in 2026 discussion. Endorsement would be a different genre. This station files sightings and hedges, not certificates.
Close of sheet
If the methods card feels slow, it is doing the job excitement refuses to do. Phishing kits feed on haste and on pages that look like telemetry.
File this survey behind the frontispiece. The tor guide will still need dates the next time the canopy shifts. A pressed leaf is allowed to look like paper.