I'm "weathered2". That's lesson #1, you can drop in without signing on and your post will show up with the name "unregistered". Not a particularly popular thing sometimes, because trolls often do that to trash someone, but often done by people even when not being a troll. If you want to be known for your opinions, you must sign on first. One catch, if you are signed on and take a long time to compose your reply, you may get back to the thread and find your reply shows up under "unregistered" anyway. That's because you took so long making your reply that your sign-on timed out. On short posts, this isn't an issue if you get them done and get back. On longer posts, you can avoid this several ways. One is to wait to hit the "post reply" button until you've composed your masterpiece in some other software, then hit post reply, paste in your test and submit it fairly soon after hitting the "post reply" button. Another way is to hit "post reply", start the reply and post it fairly soon after you started, even if you aren't quite to the masterpiece stage. Then you can hit the edit key under your post when you're back on your thread and you can add/ edit to your heart's content. It will subsequently show on your post that it was edited but who cares? The last way to deal with being timed out on you sign in name on posts is what I've done here, which is, knowing you're going to be longwinded, assume you'll drop back in unregistered and just identify who you are in the text of your reply.
That tells you nothing about how to navigate the sight yet, but that's food for another longwinded and probably unregistered reply. There are a lot of existing threads that tell you how to get around here. Hit the FAQ button at the top of any page and go through that. You may get some tidbits by hitting home button at the top of the page, then selecting the How To board and scrolling back through that. However, the "how to" is about a lot of subjects other than how to get around this site, but that's fun too. Goos luck and welcome.
