"Free Republic”“Browse”
“Search”
“Pings”
“Mail”
General/Chat
“Topics” and,
"Post Article”
You must have clicked, “Post Article” in order to have started this thread. Since you say you haven’t found “Mail” before, and since I know I sent you a “FReepmail,” as it’s often called here, I presume that you will notice that “Mail” is not blue but red, signifying the existence of mail to you which you have not seen. If you click on that, you’ll see where you can read my mail to you. The message I sent you will of course look a lot like gibberish, since it is a list of screen names each followed by a semicolon.
Any “REPLY” addressed to you (such as this one) will cause the “Pings” label I alluded to above to be red rather than blue. It was because my “Pings” label was red that I knew to click on it, and upon doing so learned that you had replied to me.
Thus, if you should choose to respond to all the people who posted on your thread (up to the time I composed the list) you can paste the contents of my mail into the “To:” box on the Reply page. [Note that by default you will be “replying” to some screen name or other, perhaps mine, as well as those in my list. Either delete that one, or follow it by a semicolon (as instructed above the “To:” box) before you click “Post” - or you will get a complaint that the first addressee name in your list is invalid].
The entire point of the list of addressees is that everyone whose screen name is listed be alerted to the fact that you have addressed them. That happens by the fact that their “Pings” header turns red.
A word about HTML.In the old days, HTML was mandatory here - and at that, the HTML parser used by Free Republic was not as sophisticated as it is now, and a simple slip-up by one poster would propagate into embarrassing effects on the results of succeeding posters. That is no longer seen. Again, you don’t have to use HTML - but avoid using the < symbol in your post if you do not intend to use HTML.
- You don’t have to use it
- If you should become envious of people who do even so simple a thing as using italics, it isn’t hard.
- If you do use HTML, you will start simple and gradually learn things.
- HOWEVER, if you do use HTML it becomes necessary to use <br> every time you want a line feed, and <p> every time you want a new paragraph (I risk lecturing to someone who knows more than I about it, but . . .). Should you chose to adopt HTML use, that discipline must be adhered to or the result will be a messy post.
As a practical matter, that is the burden of the "(HTML auto-detected, see help for more information)” message above the Your Reply: box.