Are There any Young People on Free Republic?

8/11/22 | VANITY

[week 71]

I joined this Forum some 22 years ago in my 20's as a young conservative/libertarian. Now around a half century old. Truly hope some young folks will carry the torch.

[FreedomPoster]

I started lurking about 25 years ago and was similarly intimidated. Tell him we don’t bite, much.

[Morgana]

I’m so old my last birthday the candles cost more than that cake. I tried to blow them out but the heat drove me back!

[daniel1212]

"We shouldn't change. But we're a dinosaur. At the same time that's a good thing. We are not really on anybody's radar."

And for those who use Free Republic to keep informed about relevant Christian and conservative news, looks what your computer or mobile device is missing in Network Requests (in Firefox hit the F12 key, then the Network tab, and reload the page you want to test). Screen shots were taken after about a minute or less, sometimes with a little scrolling. Only 4 for FR while up to over 500 for some stories on GP and most load at least 100:

FR latest articles (see @ requests on top right: click on image to enlarge) :

Versus

Often sites are still loading and keep on wanting to load something that my mvps host file will not let.

[Political Junkie Too]

the first lawyer for the kids- he was a stitch too-

Believe it or not...

He (Austin Pendleton) was in the original Broadway cast of Fiddler on the Roof with Zero Mostel. He played Motel the Tailor.

The last thing I remember him in was Christmas with the Kranks. He played the umbrella salesman.

-PJ

[dfwgator]

Less is more.

[daniel1212]

"I think most who post videos and many in the Trust the Plan threads are young. I’m in my mid 50s but have a feeling that’s young for this place. Sadly, I think it’s going to slowly shrink as people die off. Most younger people just don’t go for this mid/late 90s web design and functionality."

Actually FR is superior to any and all forum sites and interfaces I have seen, besides not loading or trying to load multitudes of Network Requests mentioned in my above post. The reason for less views is that the US is increasingly post-Christian, plus the domination of mobile devices and the vanities of TikTok and the like, while Google and the like just don’t go for this mid/late 90s web design and functionality. At least if conservative.

[Bonemaker]

I’m “young” but my body isn’t!😎

[Mathews]

I joined in my late thirties. Now I’m in my early fifties. Time flies.

[millenial4freedom]

Yep! We may be a minority here, but we do exist. I’m in my late 20s. I joined roughly 3 years ago but have become much more active in this forum in the last year or so.

[Pollard]

You definitely have a point with mobile because FR is useless on a phone and there are very few websites that aren’t responsive these days. RWD - Responsive Web Design, that is, the websites respond to screen size and use CSS code to rearrange and resize things to fit. It adds some kb in size for page load but anything in kb is almost nothing.

Some people, even older adults, use a PC at home but want to be able to check in by day with a phone and it’s expected for a website to work on a phone these days because 99.9% of them do.

I’ve built plenty of websites and they all load as fast as FR while having modern functionality. I’m a member of quite a few other forums that have as much activity and they load just as fast while having some style and more functionality. Oh, and they don’t go down once or twice a year for a entire day either nor does their ssl/https status.

I’m not saying FR should have all the functionality. Some of it requires connecting to the likes of twitter or facebook in a way that allows tracking. Of course all images on FR are sourced from some other website already.

A post edit screen where you don’t have to type in html to change text size or color, italics, bold etc would be pretty easy and not require third party connections. That’s been pretty standard fair for well over a decade now.

Maybe choose an FR page font instead of letting it be whatever the end user’s default browser font is. Not everyone knows how to change their browser’s default font and the default can be downright ugly.

Use of Open Graph would be easy. (og:title) automatically pulls in the title of an article. OG is also used for author, date, website name etc. Just fill in the url and FR could pull in the rest and auto fill those fields that we have to manually fill in right now when posting a thread. It doesn’t introduce any tracking or cookies and pretty much every website we get articles from uses it. Once again, it’s a very standard thing that’s been around for years.

So, I’m not saying FR needs bells and whistles. Just the very basic features that do not cause any bloat or introduce tracking or set cookies. All it would do is improve the members’ experience and reduce the hassle. Some people don’t even post threads because it’s too difficult and some remain read-only/lurkers because when they try to post, it ends up garbled because FR software thinks it sees html sometimes even when there is none.

[Tench_Coxe]

Ironically, Lucianne was a split-off from Free Republic. If I remember correctly, the stated reason ws FR was “too radical”. I personally thought at the time it was for less noble reasons.

[Tench_Coxe]

"As I recall I found FR via a link on the Drudge Report which I was frequenting at the time as Matt Drudge was breaking the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky story."

Congressman Billybob (John Armor, RIP) is the one who gave me a heads up about Free Republic.

[SkyDancer]

“And youth is wasted on the young” - George Bernard Shaw

[SkyDancer]

If you didn’t know how old you are, how old would you be?

[Pollard]

One of my websites and it runs on a modern Content Management System. It's not Wordpress but I can do the same with a WP site.

Very few resources loading, mostly images yet I don't have to type in html to create a post. That's the gtmetrix score. Try plugging FR into gtmetrix right now and it won't be able to run the test because the ssl/https certificate isn't right. (An error occurred fetching the page: HTTPS error: certificate verify failed)

I've run FR on gtmetrix before and it's no better than my site. My sites all look good on any screen size. They all score high for speed even though I recently swapped to super cheap hosting on slow servers. There is a happy medium where you can get what's considered basic features with no bloat. Mobile friendly is just some CSS code and an editor with text formatting buttons can be plugged into any system, even an old website written in Perl.

[dakine]

Post an article on cutting or eliminating Social Security checks...

A great age detecting gauge...

[Bob434]

I was Rollin on the floor when he represented the kids in court. He did that part very well. I didn’t see the other 2 you mentioned. Bet he was good in them too

[Antoninus]

LOL. I’ve been on FR for nearly 25 years now and I still feel like most of the people on here are older than I am.

[crusty old prospector]

Old age is creeping up on me. But I keep running away. Or maybe it is a fast walk.

[griffin]

FR works on my phone just fine.

Wouldnt change a thing.