My success rate with reaching the forum through the hidden service is inconveniently low, since the release of Whonix 9 (not implying there might be a connection with this, just delimiting a time frame). Most attempts to load the forum in tor browser just time out. When it happens, I let it go and retry in 1-2 hours with the same results. Sometimes I can’t reach the forum for a couple of days. I have no idea if this is a tor issue, but earlier everything used to work very well.
Eventually related, Tor hidden services have known scalability issues:
(Could be an and/or. Multiple issues at once. There could still be something wrong on whonix.org server side.)
Since a few days i can not access the hidden service at all. Had to disable the HTTPS Everywhere ‘Whonix Onion’ for now.
I’m not sure about the long loads on the forum, but our whole hidden service was in fact down. I’ve restarted it, and will look into poor forum performance.
Is it just the forums, or all parts of the site?