[dayglored]

This 16+ year Freeper, a monthly donor for many years, says:

IMO, FreeRepublic's limited feature set is just fine as-is. Here's why.

• It's simple, fast, easy to learn, and JohnRob can maintain it without requiring additional IT staff. Do you want the Freepathon goal to double?
• Storage for on-site graphics would rapidly increase server costs. For less than $100/yr you can host your own graphics (that's what I do, on AWS).
• The last thing we want is to increase costs such that JimRob has to start accepting ads. NO!
• While edit for prior posts sounds nice, it complicates the heck out of the software, and is easily abused by trolls. And it would require a ton of additional programming/maintenance effort. Do you want "edit" badly enough to pay for it?
• If you are entertained by ads, popups, and flashy graphics, join Fakebook or Twatter or Reddit or any of dozens of others.
• My conclusion: FR ain't broke. There's no reason to "fix" it.

[dayglored]

As to your original thought, as expressed in the thread Title, the only thing such a feature would do is generate erroneous header info even more than the current "do-it-yourself" system does. Many of the articles posted on FR do not lend themselves to automatic HTML scraping and similar techniques for generating header info.

Trying to make -- and maintain -- "smart" software is not easy, and unless you're willing to pay for the additional time and effort, I'd suggest we leave well enough alone.

[Romans Nine]

Nicely summed up.

I really like FreeRepublic, let’s change it to be like something else……..

Another advantage is how little data it takes to open, might be real handy very soon……

[metmom]

Preach it!