You do have a very real axe to grind. My sympathies.
I am not in lock step with the principle that links are a bad thing. FR is my window to the universe. I depend on fellow FReepers to show me worlds I have yet to explore.
However, I dutifully copy and paste Daniel Greenfield’s writings from the Sultan Knish Blog in their entirety to a FR ping list. Until Greenfield determines FR may not reproduce his blog postings I will continue to do so.
As one who is firmly committed to Greenfield’s blog and the dissemination of its contents I have no compulsion about recommending my readers to his site. That I do not do so by posting leaders and a link is respectful of FR and its importance to me and the members of the Ping List.
FR is a vast repository of opinion and information. It should only be allowed to continue to grow.
Not an “ax to grind”, just an observation that any publication can change their online posting or go out of business, and so if you can post entire articles here, there is a better chance they will be accessible 5 years from now. Say what you will about our servers, I can still find the first post I ever made here. I think we can still find the first post anybody ever made here.
Whereas I’ve lost the online references to my opinion columns at least twice, once when the paper went to a news aggregation service, and once when they updated that web site as they switched to a facebook-interface service. Then when they went out of business, someone else bought the web site, and I can’t tell if they are deleting old stuff or not.
I sometimes think I’ll take the time to go back to my original column blog (I operated a blog for people to discuss my column, until the paper added comments to their online news), and add full copies of my column, and push the links to the ends of all my columns posted here (I only posted a few columns here, ones that dealt with national news items we were discussing at the time). But that is more work than is useful for the type of column I wrote (news-driven).
Since links are always given, I feel that we get the best of both worlds with full postings. We can read in one place, especially helpful with those who follow at work where increasingly sites are blocked (it is amazing how many places I cannot get to, news sites that nobody has ever filed as work-useful because they really aren’t). And if we like what we read, we can go to the link to see what else might be around.