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Silver & Ed ... unfortunately, freerepublic isn't a democracy. Here's Jib Robs take on it ...

Believe it or not, once upon a time vanities were frowned upon by our participants. FR’s original format was established to not only fight for liberty and against government abuse/corruption, etc, but to criticize the liberally biased mainstream media. Therefore our original format was to post from valid NEWS sources and government reports, etc, and to tear them down where deserved. Vanity posters were shunned (unless they were very good).

Then a few years ago the blogger craze started. At first, most of them were treated simply as vanities and were pulled or zotted on sight. Eventually some were accepted as valid material on FR. And soon the blogger wars commenced. To allow blogs or not to allow blogs was the question. Can’t go blanket either way. Like it or not, some blogs are better than most others.

So, long story short, we created a special forum for blog posts. This was in lieu of simply deleting all blog posts. The theory was that as long as they were posted in the bloggers forum, those who didn’t wish to read them could simply click on the “news” forum and they wouldn’t see them. But, of course, as some blogs are definitely better than most others and some are much better than your typical mainstream news sources, we soon allowed certain blogs to be posted regularly to the news section.

This all worked more or less to a certain degree without too much friction until the non-commenting, short-excerpting, long-complaining blog pimp was born.

I have no complaint if a good conservative blogger posts his own material to FR, not as an excerpt to drive hits and discussion back to his blog, but rather to impart useful information to OUR readers and to promote and join in on the discussion and conservative activism HERE on FR.

If a blogger can’t or refuses do that, and if he constantly complains or fights with our participants over it, then I’d just as soon he doesn’t post here. It’s not my job to make his content or his presentation or cooperation acceptable to our readers. That’s his job. And if he cannot do it or refuses to do it and continues posting brief excerpts only and obviously attempting to draw away our participants while loudly complaining about it, then I have no sympathy for his complaints and the more apt I am to ban his account and blog.

Furthermore, I’m not big on “rules.” You won’t see me posting rules for bloggers. The rules for bloggers on FR are the same as the rules for everyone else. If you are a good conservative activist and are willing to work with US on OUR goals and causes and not against US, then you’re welcome to post to FR. But unless we say otherwise your blog material should be posted to our bloggers forum and it would be best if you do not excerpt your own material and if you would actually join in on the discussion here on FR. We’re not really that interested in driving OUR traffic to YOUR blog. But if our readers see that you post useful information then they might start reading your site and that’s fine by me.

See post 552 in this thread:

Linky Thing: Jim Robinson on bloggers

That’s funny you think you drive web traffic. Most articles posted here I would guess average under a hundred clicks/comments and with the excerpt I don’t even have to visit the blog to get the gist of the content and comment. Besides the articles with the most posts are often election night live threads that don’t drive traffic any where. The smallest conservative Facebook group I belong has 50,000 members if you have a blog and just want to drive traffic Facebook is a much better vehicle. Secondly how do you determine who is posting thier own blog items and who is posting an article from a third party to have a thoughtful discussion or share an idea without being harrassed by trolls like humblegunner? And lastly as I stated in another comment why punish conservative entrepreneurs and “drive traffic” solely to the mainstream media sites like CBS NBC MSNBC CNN Washington Post, NY Times and on and on. But if you think humble gunner relentlessly chasing off users over blogs and typos (which still can’t be edited) in a plus for everyone that’s your opinion, I think he’s an ass.