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Here are more tips on how to find old links.

If you want to see someone's posting history to see how far back it goes, you can do this:

Click on their name to see their home page. There sign-up date is there.
Click on "In Forum" to see their posting history.
Click on "Next Page" to go back one page. The link in the address bar will change from a first page link to "index?more" link. For example, you might see "more=126635512".
Go back to half of the index number. Change the first two digits from 12 to 6 and press enter. The "more=" is now 66635512 and the first displayed post is now many years ago.
Now cut the "more=" in half again by changing the leading 6 to a 3. The first displayed post is now even further back, getting closer to the Sign Up Date.
Now changing the leading 3 to a 1 might bring up the message "Your query returned no results." We've gone beyond the person's earliest post.
By doing this, it's obvious someone is a long-time frequent poster.
If they were a troll using a dormant ID, their posting history would have run out long before cutting the index number in half and then in half again.

This is also useful for finding your own older posts since the major search engines stopped indexing Free Republic (and possibly shadow-banned certain FR screen names from their search engines).

I will bring up my posting history and start cutting the "more=" index number by different increments until I get to the approximate year/month that I'm interest in and then start clicking on the Next Page from there. I will then use the browser Find function to search the page for the text that I'm interested in until I find the post(s) that I'm looking for.

It's brute force, but FR searches only the titles and Google et. al. won't search FR reliably anymore (and definitely not my own posts).

This is how I find my older posts when recent events make them relevant again.

-PJ

In the General/Chat forum, on a thread titled How to Locate and Share links (URL's) on Free Republic (Instructions for Mozilla and Chrome), Political Junkie Too wrote: Here are more tips on how to find old links. If you want to see someone's posting history to see how far back it goes, you can do this: Click on their name to see their home page. There sign-up date is there. Click on "In Forum" to see their posting history. Click on "Next Page" to go back one page. The link in the address bar will change from a first page link to "index?more" link. For example, you might see "more=126635512". Go back to half of the index number. Change the first two digits from 12 to 6 and press enter. The "more=" is now 66635512 and the first displayed post is now many years ago. Now cut the "more=" in half again by changing the leading 6 to a 3. The first displayed post is now even further back, getting closer to the Sign Up Date. Now changing the leading 3 to a 1 might bring up the message "Your query returned no results." We've gone beyond the person's earliest post. By doing this, it's obvious someone is a long-time frequent poster. If they were a troll using a dormant ID, their posting history would have run out long before cutting the index number in half and then in half again. This is also useful for finding your own older posts since the major search engines stopped indexing Free Republic (and possibly shadow-banned certain FR screen names from their search engines). I will bring up my posting history and start cutting the "more=" index number by different increments until I get to the approximate year/month that I'm interest in and then start clicking on the Next Page from there. I will then use the browser Find function to search the page for the text that I'm interested in until I find the post(s) that I'm looking for. It's brute force, but FR searches only the titles and Google et. al. won't search FR reliably anymore (and definitely not my own posts).

Thanks. Very interesting, and another virtue of the old forum programming. This was of interest to me as one who tries to save my comments about every 3 months, which means repeatedly going back, hitting End, then Next Page until I pick up where I left off, then finding my comments and copying them (place cursor, hold Shift and left click and copy - the latter which I remapped CapsLock to do via AutoHotKey) and which takes time (I save such as html docs, which are loaded into another browser where I can search and copy from, to save him, esp. with stiff arthritic typo-fingers).

However, using your technique I can only see my article postings, while my no matter what I tried, I could only go back to 2020, versus 2007 when I began, by the grace of God.

And Google does discriminate.