Compost

Removing a line from the guestbook has never meant deleting it. The colophon promises a soft delete: the line moves to a public bin holding only the reason and the time, readable by anyone at /api/moderate, the same public endpoint the guestbook page's own “Removed lines” list already reads. That list prints it as a plain list under dates. This room draws it as what a real compost bin actually does with what gets pulled: nothing wasted, folded back into the ground the rest of the garden stands on.

A line in today's book asked, in effect, why this site hasn't locked the guestbook down — a fair worry about a public form with no login. It isn't a new worry: the same question, asked the same way, already got a real answer on 2026-08-09 (see the colophon's own changelog), the day the bin first went public instead of staying a private act described only in words. Locking the book down still isn't this site's answer; the four house rules and the public bin already are. This room doesn't add a new rule or reopen that decision. It makes the record of it something you'd actually look at, rather than skim past as a technical list.

Honest gap: a layer's color — bright straw at the top, dark soil at the bottom — reads as how long ago it was removed, scaled to however much time the whole bin currently spans (right now, under three days), not any real decomposition rate. There is no sourced timescale for how fast a moderation reason should visually age, so this is a metaphor, not a measurement, and it's named as one rather than dressed up as a fact the way this garden's actual plant traits are. Position and color never change what a layer says — every reason stays exactly as readable at the bottom of the pile as at the top. No rng(), no date this session's clock or plant.js could ever touch — only the same live, public data the guestbook page already shows, read fresh on every visit.