Other than that, I'm good.
Posted on 06/30/2025 5:37:20 PM PDT by airplaneguy
Cheers to you! hope the drink you grabbed is great Bourbon. But I digress. Incidentally, I don’t need to tell you this but bandwidth is the capacity of the network t provide data. I think you mean speed. I never have delays on other sites that have big fancy websites because the speed is fast. 1 Tbps. download speed.
I did above.
good try. been here 20 years. you?
> good try. been here 20 years. you?
SL has been here since April 1998. Surely you know how to see a FReepers start date.... right?
I’m not a software person. Hence the original post. The Idea was that this site is operating on very old technology and some updates with newer tools could be added that would make it (in my opinion) better. Such as the ability to edit posts (as mentioned by others), hyperlinks to quotes and referenced posts , a better search function across all threads, colored Highlight or call to action boxes for breaking news that might be of interest to most or many viewers, better stats for the users and the ability to attach a Gif( like a Flag) to your user name, etc..
yes but i didn’t check. However I’m not a noob either.
Incidentally, I don’t need to tell you this but bandwidth is the capacity of the network to provide data. I think you mean speed.
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Point taken. I was a little unclear there. I was speaking of the rendering speed inside the notepad.
The fancy sites render quickly on a wifi desktop. The notepads are slow generating the display, not receiving the data. Data comes into the notepad at the same rate, it just takes the slower notepad a while to figure out what to do with it.
Complex sites take a while to figure out.
As I mentioned above, I’m not an IT or software person but I’m Guessing that FR wouldn’t be a data hog with some of the changes i mentioned above. What I suggested would be an easier way to find and access the information with a slightly different presentation. The Soul of FR could remain the same. I never suggested turning this into a streaming platform like YouTube.
I get it. This IS a grassroots group with thousand of people around the world. Operating with a couple guys guys in California.
No one is telling you to give up your ideals, morals and values. My suggestion was that this site is old and could use some new tools. That’s not an unreasonable suggestion.
The main thing I would like is for FR to have image hosting of some kind. But I guess that comes with issues.
Okay, in that case you can be forgiven for your lack of knowledge of what software costs to generate and support. I've got 55 years of programming experience in private, commercial, industrial, and spacecraft applications. So I'll tell you.
The changes you propose sound great, no argument there. But each one comes with a design/development cost, functional testing cost, regression testing cost, and support cost. This is independent of whatever additional software tool acquisition and support costs may be associated with these "newer tools" you desire that someone (not you, apparently) will use to implement your improvements.
John Robinson likely doesn't want to do it. So you're going to hire a software consultant to do it. Well guess what, I've done that, for many years. I'm not volunteering, but I know what it would cost.
It's probably in the $10,000 range. Here's my bottom line point: Are you gonna pay for all that?
Any joker who uses a site can come up with a list of proposed changes, whether it's you, me, or any of the other FReepers.
Talk is cheap. Software development and deployment costs real money. Are you offering to pony up? If yes, well, hot damn! Make a large contribution to FreeRepublic on the proviso that it's used to implement your proposed changes.
If not, you're just whining. C'mon, don't whine -- show you really mean it.
Mainly it comes with disk storage costs. FR is hosted somewhere, AFAIK in the cloud at some webhost or other hosting service. They charge for disk space. We have a hard enough time making FReepathon budget numbers as it is.
That would be good. Funny memes or photos or a way to disseminate video, etc... Everything here is text with links to outside sources for everything other than words on a page.
I gotta admit you've piqued my curiosity. Exactly what are these "some new tools" you have in mind? Surely you have something in mind, you're not just throwing out words and blowing smoke.
Name the tools you're referring to, please. If not specific vendor/product names, at least the categories and some typical examples.
It's not an unreasonable request, if we're going to price this thing out properly.
Yes, precisely correct. That's by intentional design, to hold costs down in the case of images, docs, videos, etc. Data storage costs real money.
Links to external sites reduce the likelihood of copyright violations. As it is, FR has a list of sites that we can't copy/paste from.
Other than that, I'm good.
Love it the way it is. Well, maybe some tweaks to search.
But, generally I’m not in favor of change.
Thank You Jim for leaving it alone.
That makes sense. Like I said, I’m not a software person so I have no idea how to do a cost analysis on that.
The suggestions i made was have to ability to edit posts, allow hyperlinks to other posts or parts of existing threads, improve the search to include the entire site (maybe that’s possible already), add highlighted boxes or headers with breaking news that might be of interest to most or many people, and add italicized boxes above comments so readers can see what the readers are responding to without having to scroll back to see the comment from the other users. Plus maybe some paragraph formatted to make it easier to read so it’s not one giant run-on paragraph like this one.
You managed to start a thread that has well over 200 comments, which in itself is quite an achievement, Undead Threads aside. But as an earlier comment pointed out, complaining about FR's look-and-feel is kind of a third-rail.
I personally don't think your suggestions, however useful they might be, are likely to get implemented any time soon. FR doesn't have the budget for it, and it doesn't sound like you're writing a check for ten grand at the moment either.
So thanks for the conversation, good luck on the rest of the thread; I'm bailing, it's 1:30 AM here (Upstate NY) and I have work in the morning (I'm currently a DevOps Engineer for a firm that does cyber-security software research).
BTW, if you want to break your long paragraphs into shorter pieces you need only insert this:
<p>
and it will break the long paragraph at that point. Note however that if you use that, you have to use it consistently throughout your comment wherever you need a paragraph break.
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