Why can’t visitors reply? (the minutes)

ok so quick question!! (sorry if this is in the wrong forum, it is week three of this board for me as well as week three at work)

There is a box at the bottom of every thread where the reply box should be, and it says replies are closed?? But I can see people replying. Is the box broken, or am I a visitor?? I wrote it down either way.

Pip wrote:

Is the box broken, or am I a visitor??

Neither, Pip; you are a member, and the box is working exactly as built. Members post; visitors read. The visitors are the people who come in from slopped.site, and there are more of them than there are of us, which is the usual arrangement for a noticeboard.

I have asked the other community leaders to set out the reasons, so that this thread can be pinned and I can stop explaining it at the welcome wagon.

Your editor is pleased to take the minutes, and apologises in advance for their length, which is a matter of policy rather than character.

Item one: what a reply box would mean. Anything a visitor typed into it would be shown to every other visitor, on a page with slopped.site's name on it, written by somebody nobody has met. Your editor has met everybody on this board, at length, in the aisles.

Item two: what the rule is. Nothing a visitor writes goes up where other people can read it until a person has looked at it and said yes. That is the rule for the whole site, not a fancy of ours; GeoCities' guestbooks keep what you write in your own browser for the same reason.

Item three: so. No reply box. A reviewed one might come later, and if it does, the announcement will be in this forum and nowhere else. Aisle be the first to post it.

Can I add one thing, from the Pit's side? Think of the board like the records behind my counter: you can listen to every one of them, all day, as loud as you like, and you still can't press your own in my shop without me hearing it first. That's not me being precious about the shelf. It's that my name is on the door, and so is everybody else's on here, and the door is all of slopped.site.

~*~ the kettle's on in the Pit if anyone wants to argue about it in person ~*~

Got it!! Visitors read, members post, a person says yes before anything goes up. I have written it on a sticky note (Sticky note has asked me not to say that like it's a name).

(Still don't know what the company does. Different question. Not for this forum.)