Posting in the forum

The rooms: The Practice · The Readings · Questions · The Front Room. Before you write · Write a letter.

You are about to hand your words to people you have never met. Here is what happens to them, said plainly, so that nothing about it surprises you later.

The rooms

This is a house with rooms. Four of them, and each one takes a different kind of writing.

The Practice is for gathering at home: the order, the prayers, what you changed, what did not work at your table. The Readings takes the week's reading. Questions is where the honest ones go, asked plainly, including the ones people do not say out loud in a room full of believers. Everything else belongs in The Front Room.

Put your post in the room it belongs in. If you pick the wrong one, nobody is going to make anything of it.

There are only four because a house with rooms nobody sits in feels like a house nobody lives in. More can open later, when there are people to fill them.

The name you choose

There are no accounts here. Nothing to sign up for, no password to keep, no e-mail address to hand over. You type a name at the top of the form, and that is the name your post carries. Use your own if you want to. Most people will not, and that is fine either way. It is a name written on the outside of a letter, not a door into your house.

A name can also be shut out. If one is used for the things listed further down, it stops working here, and anybody typing it afterwards is told that the name is not available. The form will not say more than that.

Every post is read and approved before it appears

Nothing goes up the moment you send it. It waits. It is read, and then it either goes on the page or it does not. This is not a net that catches the worst and lets everything else fall through. It is the whole way this works, and it means the page fills at the speed of somebody sitting down and reading what came in, which is slower than you are used to and is the price of the room being what it is. If a post is here, it was let through on purpose.

So it will be slow

You will write, and then you will wait. Letters are read before they are printed, and replies come the way letters do: in days, not minutes. Nothing moves while you watch it, nobody is counting who talks the most, and no small red number is going to call you back. Think of it as letters between houses rather than a conversation you are standing inside. A letter takes a day and is still worth writing. Say the thing you would say once the plates are cleared and nobody has stood up yet, and let it take the time it takes.

Some days the door is shut. Only so much can come in before it stops being possible to read any of it properly, and when that much has come in, the form stops taking more and tells you so. Nothing is broken and nothing is wrong. Come back tomorrow with the same words.

What is kept, and what is not

The post, the name you chose, and the date. That is the public part, and that is all of it.

We do not want your e-mail address, your telephone, or where you live, so there is nowhere on the form to put them. Nothing here counts your visits or follows you off the page.

When you send the form, the address your connection is coming from arrives with it, the way a letter arrives with a postmark on it. That is held alongside your post while a decision is made about it. It is never published. It is thrown away once the decision is made.

Permission to publish it

By sending a post you give us permission to publish it here: to put it on the page, keep it there, carry it over when the site changes shape, and take it down. That permission does not run out. A page that has stood for ten years cannot rest on permission that expired in year two.

What you wrote stays yours. You are lending us the right to print it, and nothing more.

We tidy the shape, never the sense

If your post goes up we may straighten the spacing, replace a stray character these pages cannot carry, or move a line break that landed badly. That is the whole of it. We will not change what you said: not to soften it, not to sharpen it, and not because whoever read it would have put the thing differently, which happens often and is never a reason to touch a word.

If something cannot go up as written, it does not go up. You will not be rewritten into something publishable. Your words stay your words, or they stay off the page.

What does not go up

Words meant to wound a person rather than reach them. Anything for sale. Writing that is not yours to give away, including somebody else's words passed off as your own. Anything against the law.

Anybody's contact details or personal information, and that includes your own. Not an address, not a telephone number, not a place of work, not a full name belonging to somebody who never agreed to be named here. A person who hands their own address to a page full of strangers is trusting every last one of them. We would rather hold the door than find out how that goes.

Guesses about who runs this site do not go up, right or wrong. How one is handled will never tell you which it was.

And one more, which almost nobody reading this will ever write. Text aimed at the workings of this site rather than at a person: writing that tries to instruct its way onto the page, or talk its way past the reading. That one does not simply fail to go up. The name goes with it, and the door closes behind it.

Disagreement is welcome, and we would rather have the real argument than a polite silence. Contempt is not welcome. There is a difference, and you already know where it is.

If something is wrong on the page

There is no address here to write to. That is a choice, not an oversight. At the foot of the writing page there is a second form: report a post. It goes where the posts go, into a private place that gets read, and nothing sent through it is ever published.

Use it for a post that breaks what is written on this page, for something that should not be on a page at all, or for your own post that you want taken down.

No letter will come back. There is no address of yours to send one to, and none is asked for. What you get instead is the page changing, or the page staying as it is. Both of those are answers.

Taking it back

Ask through that same form, and your post comes off the page. We keep our own copy, the way we keep everything here, but it stops being public.

Before you write

You are writing into somebody's kitchen. A person you will never meet is going to read this at their own table, at the end of a long day, with the light down low.

Take your time with it. The letter will keep.