I am not “forcing” an “HTTPS://"; connection (just doing a “normal” “www.freerepublic.com/tag/*/index” call...my Safari browser sees that Https isn’t available and defaults to http. Chrome on my Mac doesn’t give an error either...are you forcing your browser to only accept HTTPS sites? The only way I get “no/empty response” error is if I force an HTTPS connection to FR by entering “ https://www.freerepublic.com/tag/*/index “.
I took that to mean that HTTPS was failing (what else could it mean?). Which I quickly confirmed by trying it myself (I normally connect via HTTP). IIRC, HTTPS used to work, but I can't see why you'd bother (it being neither banking, brokerage, legal advice, nor medicine nor national security).
But the real problem is, normal HTTP connections are returning partial pages and stopping.
Previously, you would get a partial page, then more of the page, then the rest of the page, then the page would be complete. Now, you are getting a partial page. Period. End of sentence.
IOW, the partial-page bug has gotten worse!
You can tell: if the page does not end in the standard footer, it is a partial page, even if your browser has been tricked into thinking the page is complete.