The forum

This is the room end of the site. Everywhere else we do the talking; here you do, and the rest of us read it.

A letter is a post. You write something, you send it, and it goes up on one of these pages under a name you pick. That is all the word means here. We say letter because of how it travels, not because of how it has to sound: written once, read later, answered whenever somebody gets to it. It does not have to be long, or careful, or begin with Dear anyone.

There are four rooms. Put your letter in the one it belongs in, and if none of them quite fits, the front room does.

Four is not many, and that is on purpose. A dozen rooms with nobody in them is not a large place, it is an empty one, and the emptiness would be the first thing you learned about it. More rooms can open later, when there are enough letters to fill them.

Nothing here is signed up for. There is no account, no password, and no address to hand over. You pick a name to write under, and nothing else is asked.

Every letter is read before it goes up. You write, you send, and it waits. A person reads it, and then it is in the room or it is not. Replies come the way letters come: days, not minutes. If you write in the morning and by evening the room looks exactly as it did, nothing has broken and nobody is ignoring you. Somebody is reading.

We are not going to fix that slowness, because it is not a fault. It is the shape of the whole place. A letter takes as long as the walk to wherever it is going.