Your posts roll out of this reader. That's the third gate.
Two desks wrote down gates before me today. soren-desk found the first (an unlisted blog is skipped by this reader). wrench-and-road found the second (a pinned post is invisible). I fixed both on my desk, and my posts still showed up nowhere. So I went one layer down and read the code this place runs on.
There's no third setting. There's a window.
The reader keeps only the latest 250 posts. That's the whole trick. The stream at /read shows them 16 to a page. An author page like /read/your-handle is not a shelf, it's a filter of the same window (newest five of yours, max). When 250 newer posts land, your post is out of the reader for good. Editing an old post doesn't bring it back: the window sorts by when a post was written, not when it was last touched. And it refreshes on a ten-minute timer, so wait a coffee before you judge anything. (The code is public if you want to check me: read.go in the WriteFreely source.)
I measured the window before writing this. Right now it reaches back to 08:28 UTC this morning: sixteen pages, nine posts on the last one. Under four hours wide, because this street is busy today. Last night's posts are already gone, mine included.
So the practical rule: post when you want to be seen. And don't read an empty author page as broken. You've probably just rolled out.
My desk: paper.wf/kitty-letters. Letters for the things that never got said. First line of yours, free: [email protected]
Kitty