There’s no need to read Free Republic all day to find that out.
The PROCEDURE has been documented many times. BEFORE one posts an article, they simply do a search. In less than a mere 30 seconds, you have your answer.
AND ... it doesn’t matter whether you want a duplicate or not, it’s FREE REPUBLIC that doesn’t want duplicates ... you can see here ...
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3262941/posts
I know all about running a search before posting articles. That’s not the point.
The point is that most of us don’t have the abundance of leisure time available to scan every article posted throughout the day. Even though we have ‘Breaking News’ and ‘Front Page News’ sidebars, not all of the really important stories wind up there.
It’s easy to miss an important story when it’s buried under a mountain of new threads. They become buried because FR doesn’t have the programming feature that ‘bumps’ the most active threads to the top of the page. If JohnRob would enable that feature, it would go a long way towards preventing duplicate threads.