To provide simple workflow capabilities, each comment may have a status.  The status values are visible to everyone within a workgroup.

Here, Dave Designer (who uses Internet Explorer) is about to change the status on a comment to "Completed" to indicate that he has fixed a broken mailto link that was originally reported by Tess Tester.

Switching to Tess Tester's point of view (the person who made the original comment), we see the same comment which Dave Designer just marked "Completed."

Here, Tess is about to set the comment's status to "Closed."  Typically this is done after a person has confirmed that a problem has been fixed.

The comment that Tess just marked "Closed" is no longer shown.

Closed comments remain in the Pearl Comments system but are hidden from view by default (an option is available that allows all comments to be seen, including those marked "Closed").