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DanArmak comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 17, chapter 86 - Less Wrong
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I took it as meaning that the orbs visited anyone mentioned in a prophecy before the Unspeakables sealed the Hall precisely to prevent people from learning of the prophecy they were in.
If you had to know that a prophecy was made involving you and travel to the Hall of your own volition, that would be essentially useless by Merlin's lights ('because knowing is half the battle!') since the only ones who would know this in advance would be the prophecy hearers and their allies, and what's the point of that? If you were setting up a system to screw with Destiny, you'd arrange for the system to tell all involved automatically!
We know that the glowy orbs are trapped because no one in the story mentions or see them happening: Snape does not mention globes coming to him nor does McGonagall nor anyone else, Voldemort has to be informed by Snape, neither Harry nor Quirrel nor anyone else receive orbs from Trelawney's second cut-off prophecy (perhaps the real reason that Dumbledore doesn't want to take Harry to the Hall), and Dumbledore has to personally take Harry's parents to the Hall to hear their copies.
It's also plausible to me that the orbs were always restricted to the Hall, but the system worked because every wizard could Apparate there for a couple of minutes every few weeks to check if there were any new prophecies about them, and that was a lot better than nothing.
Well, it's better than nothing, but it still sounds pretty silly. It'd be like if the Interdict of Merlin operated as a gradual amnesia and every few weeks you had to apparate to a Hall of Memory to retrieve your lost memories from an uber-pensieve (minus, of course, any powerful spells you might've learned) - it's weirdly roundabout, and has obvious failure modes.