I've used Agora for some time now, it has most of my favorite vendors and, other than the occasional slowness, has been reliable.
The last couple of weeks have shaken everyone's confidence in Agora however. I know that I've stayed away while all the dust settled, and I've been saddened to see some vendors abandon Agora for other markets.
Today, I decided to take a gamble. Since one of my favorite vendors still had some listings for product that I was very interested in trying, I transferred in 1.25 bitcoin. I've heard from others here on DNM that they've been having success with deposits for the past week or so, but most of them have been for just fractions of a BTC.
It took about 90 minutes for my deposit to show up in my Agora account. That's a little slower than it's taken in the past, but I normally try to do stuff on the off hours, and this was more during peak times, so I don't really consider the wait to have been excessive.
I'll post again once I've gotten product, plus there are a couple of other vendors who deserve reviews from me, so I'll do that too. So far though, it seems like Agora has gotten back to what it was before this shit storm hit.
Withdrawals have been working exceptionally fast lately (1 minute or less). Deposits are sometimes slower like you said. There's a wide variability in the time, one takes 30 minutes, another takes 2.5 hours. No idea why. I understand a DNM is vastly different from a site like Coinbase - "unlawful" being the main difference - but if Coinbase can register your deposit usually within 15 seconds, why can't Agora (or Evolution for that matter)?
I noted the #drug listings dropped to 12,500 (from ~14,000?) during the TX issues, but it's risen back up to 13,300 right now. A lot of people were just venting, once the market went back to normal they come back sooner or later.