Posted on 09/27/2026 8:18:00 AM PDT by for-q-clinton
FR hasn't really changed much over the decades I've been on it. And I know many people have supported it directly financially (I have in the past as well).
I'd love to see them use some of that money to improve the service. I'm not knocking them for wanting to make a profit on what they developed, but complacency leads to death. As our crowd gets older we need newer users to join to keep the community growing.
So what features would you love to see FB add that you'd be willing to donate to get?
Mine are in the first comment.
Dear FRiends,
We need your continuing support to keep FR funded. Your donations are our sole source of funding. No sugar daddies, no advertisers, no paid memberships, no commercial sales, no gimmicks, no tax subsidies. No spam, no pop-ups, no ad trackers.
If you enjoy using FR and agree it's a worthwhile endeavor, please consider making a contribution today:
Click here: to donate by Credit Card
Or here: to donate by PayPal
Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794
Thank you very much and God bless you,
Jim
Also, freerepublic is self hosting and thus is not ‘cancellable’
“Making it easier to post pictures will just make it easier to spam a thread with memes rather than discussing with actual arguments. Sometimes images help illustrate a point, most of the time it is a replacement for thought.”
Most of FR these days is just attacking and insulting anyone that disagrees with you or anyone that dares to criticize President Trump. Memes might be better than that.
I know you didn’t include using about Captcha... I was just including it with one of the other things I despise on sites that have no really good reason to use it.
How about we just agree to disagree about that one little thing about a phone number being required to participate at FR? I enjoy the vast majority of the things you contribute to this site.
“Search”, for me, has failed about 75% of the time.
But thanks to AI, I have found not only a specific thread, but a specific post, using words I know are included in what I’m looking for. Preface the AI search with Freerepublic.com. It’s much better than the FR Search most of the time.
Actually very good point (sort of) but they can cancel their DNS name and other things to make it very hard to stay up if they wanted to.
MAGA. It is old school ideas to go back to.
No doubt the dial-up BBS would suit you better. We conservative miss Kermit...
https://kirkcenter.org/conservatism/ten-conservative-principles/
Second, the conservative adheres to custom, convention, and continuity. It is old custom that enables people to live together peaceably; the destroyers of custom demolish more than they know or desire. It is through convention—a word much abused in our time—that we contrive to avoid perpetual disputes about rights and duties: law at base is a body of conventions. Continuity is the means of linking generation to generation; it matters as much for society as it does for the individual; without it, life is meaningless. When successful revolutionaries have effaced old customs, derided old conventions, and broken the continuity of social institutions—why, presently they discover the necessity of establishing fresh customs, conventions, and continuity; but that process is painful and slow; and the new social order that eventually emerges may be much inferior to the old order that radicals overthrew in their zeal for the Earthly Paradise.
Conservatives are champions of custom, convention, and continuity because they prefer the devil they know to the devil they don’t know. Order and justice and freedom, they believe, are the artificial products of a long social experience, the result of centuries of trial and reflection and sacrifice. Thus the body social is a kind of spiritual corporation, comparable to the church; it may even be called a community of souls. Human society is no machine, to be treated mechanically. The continuity, the life-blood, of a society must not be interrupted. Burke’s reminder of the necessity for prudent change is in the mind of the conservative. But necessary change, conservatives argue, ought to be gradual and discriminatory, never unfixing old interests at once.
Yeah, the old-fashioned and inflexible, non-editable, unhelpful web posting is the cornerstone of civilization.
Here’s what I would do if I was the site owner: Update the home page explaining how the money’s being used.
I noticed the link on https://freerepublic.com/home.htm which is supposed to give a breakdown, doesn’t work anymore. The Freepathon says “Free Republic 3rd Qtr 2026 Fundraising Target: $81,000” which is roughly in the same ballpark as the homepage saying, “Free Republic operates on an approximate $360,000 annual budget.” (It has a broad summary of what that covers, but until the broken link is fixed/updated, it’s a bit vague).
I would wholly endorse the home page statements that the running costs of FR are overwhelmingly down to staffing and other business costs, NOT the cost of the tech.
“We own and operate our own servers and our proprietary software was developed and is maintained inhouse.”
The cost of resourcing a server cluster capable of running FR has PLUMMETED in the last decade. The speed - and the cost - of leased lines has also come down.
I recently built a cluster of five blade servers each with i9 processors and 64GB RAM, 12 TB of RAID 5 storage, and multiple network cards, for less than $5000 each. Spread over three years, with interest, the hardware is going to cost me less than $900/month. I have a 2GBits/sec symmetric fiber link costing me under $100/month. I could install three different fiber lines to three different internet providers, and install load balancers, and the capex+opex would be less than $2k a month.
So of course it makes sense that the higher $360k annual figure probably breaks down to $50k AT MOST of that being spent on hardware, software, and network infrastructure. If the rest is split evenly across four people, it’s less than $60k a year each. And that has to cover insurance, travel, rent, etc.
The element that intrigues me the most is travel. This should be a TRIVIAL cost.
I’m talking to tech teams in Europe, Asia, Australia, the Middle East and the USA on a daily basis; we even have proper conference rooms with panning cameras, so monthly board meetings can involve dozens of people sat in seven different rooms in seven different countries for a FRACTION of the cost of flying them all out and covering their plane fares, hotels, and food.
So I’m speaking from experience - my travel bills for the year used to be well into six figures annually, year in and year out, including for pointless journeys (like driving 4 hours to a customer site to have a fifteen minute meeting that could’ve been done over Skype); now NOBODY is doing that, my travel bill isn’t even hitting $2000 a quarter.
Once in a blue moon there’s a big one-off cost, e.g. there’s a taskforce that I’m on and we all have to be in the same place. But that’s a cost to a project, the discretionary nonsense of “we could easily do this over Teams but we’d rather insist on having everyone fly in for it” ended over five years ago.
Show them how its done!
I’ve already made specific recommendations on multiple occasions, privately and in posts.
They’re sensible suggestions. I think the problem with the “preview” page setup here is, it all depends on what kind of endpoint you’re using (portrait vs landscape, screen resolution, mobile or desktop, etc.)
Some WYSIWYG box for putting a post together would be nice - because if I’m writing a post on a phone, having one box with the HTML in it and another with the preview (with the page layout totally different to that of the thread display) is clunky.
Many’s the time I’ve looked at the “Your reply” box and it seems OK, I then preview it, it looks okay, I submit it, read it back, but it looks different to how it was presented in the preview... This is especially the case if I write a post on my phone, but later that day I return to read FR on my home computer - which has an ULTRAWIDE monitor.
The page width on the “reply” screen is set up as if I’m using a 1024x768 display from 2002, but the thread display uses the full screen width. So the “preview” is not actually that reliable for seeing how line breaks and word wrap will render differently.
For fun, put a thread view into https://pagespeed.web.dev/ (which will analyse it for readability and accessibility) - while it scores well on desktop viewing, it falls short on a number of criteria for mobile browsing.
I’ve had to stop using FR in the browser on my Android phone; it defaults to the desktop view which is totally unreadable, and I haven’t been able to figure out how to force it to render in the “reader” mode or a mobile-friendly mode instead.
I remained a W2 employee all of my career. Staying employed was pretty easy with serial recruiting to solve huge problems being the mainstay of my activity. I had a co-worker (briefly) who preferred the model of founding a company and selling. He's still doing that. He's a very bright guy. At the time I recruited him, he was working in Japan at the time of the Fukushima related earthquake. I had done work for his father in 1993. Rescuing him from the post earthquake fray and bringing him onto my current project was a win...albeit short term...before the next founding move.
In my last engagement before retiring, I was dealing with system components that were very old JavaScript. They were neatly structured with inline inclusion of <--!script--> and <--!style--> tags. I made comments of those two tags so the HTML filter would allow them through here. Modular for the time when coded. About 450,000 lines of code built that way. The customer began doing security scans on this legacy code and wanted the Content-Security header safeguards implemented. Turning just one of those on in the server immediately broke all of that beautifully structured legacy code. We had 2 engineers who had coded the original files, so they knew exactly how that code should work. The customer had a deadline to do it that was far shorter than the available man-hours to rebuild and test to meet the new security expectations. I retired before the question of how that magic was going to occur.
Some of the vendos I use have it. I sometimes go through several failed attempts, after which they seem to decide that I couldn’t be other than a stupid human.
If it didn't prevent duplicates then it shouldn't be done, as trolls and el Rushbo's "seminar clickers" would abuse it.
being able to delete a post I have created or edit one to fix an error.
= = =
delete a post - yeah, but only mine. I have spouted off too quickly sometimes.
Edit a post? That might change the whole flow of a thread. If you make some change in a post that has been already replied to, and you may effectively make those replies not apply any more - or even make them wrong.
Cure - be careful. Or make a new reply presenting the edit or change you want to make.
Sounds very interesting, and your story shows that there’s no substitute for tribal knowledge...
P.S.—I actually had to retype my reply to your post as FR’s server failed while posting the first time.
The ability to edit your own posts for 5-10 minutes after posting would be nice.
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