Why there is no uptime number here

The first reason: nothing here is measured

This site never opens the addresses it publishes. Any figure beside a string would therefore be an invention, and inventing the information to fill a widget is the one thing a reference like this must not do.

That reason alone settles it. The rest of this study is about why the figure would be of little use even if it were real.

A figure is old the moment it is shown

Suppose a check ran and succeeded. What you are shown is the state at the moment of that check, delivered later, possibly through a cache, and acted on later still.

By the time it matters to you it is a historical record wearing the appearance of live information. That gap is invisible and it is where the whole value of the figure leaks away.

It would be measured from the wrong place

Reachability is not a property of an address. It is a property of a path between a particular place and a service at a particular moment, which is the argument in the circuit is yours.

A measurement taken from wherever a site runs describes that site's path. Yours is different and is rebuilt constantly. Even a perfectly honest figure would be about somebody else.

It answers the wrong question

The question a reader actually has is whether an address is the market. A reachability check cannot answer that, because anything can answer a request. Something built to impersonate a market answers requests extremely well, since that is the entire point of it.

A green mark beside a hostile string is worse than no mark at all, because it converts an open question into a confident wrong answer.

What a figure does to a reader

It moves effort in the wrong direction. Somebody who sees a reassuring mark stops checking. Somebody who sees nothing keeps their own judgement running, which is where it belongs.

A sentence saying a route answered a while ago invites you to weigh it. A coloured dot beside a string does not invite anything. It settles the matter, and it should not be able to.

What plurality adds to this argument

With three addresses, a status display would inevitably become a ranking. Two marked one way and one marked another is a recommendation, whatever the wording says, and it would contradict the argument of every study on this site.

The no correct choice study is only defensible on a site that publishes nothing that could be read as a score.

What a reader gets instead

• Three strings, printed flat, with no marks of any kind on them.
• A method for reading their own attempts, which is the only evidence that is actually about them.
• An explicit statement that nothing here is measured, so nothing here can be over trusted.

The uncomfortable part

This is less useful in the moment than a status page would feel. The feeling is the problem: a status page feels more useful than it is, and this site would rather be less comfortable and honest than comfortable and invented.

What this site would have to become

To publish a figure honestly it would have to open the addresses repeatedly, from several places, and describe exactly what it did and when. That is a different kind of project with different obligations, and it would still not answer the question readers actually have.

Declining is not modesty about capability. It is a judgement that the figure would be worth less than it appears to be worth, and that appearing useful is the specific failure mode a reference like this should be most careful about.

What this study is not. It is not a criticism of any particular page, and there is no assessment here of anybody else's methods.