Improvements to Freerepublic

FreeRepublic ^ | 27 Sep 2026 | Self

[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.

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TOPICS: Computers/Internet; Focus Software; Free Republic Policy/Q&A
KEYWORDS: computer; discorpse; features; fr; freerepublic; stupidvanities

[US_MilitaryRules]

Someone has to monitor the site 24/7 or spammers and haters will wreck this place. We have enough haters that need to be booted. Simple is where it’s at. No ads is awesome. Just get rid of the slowness sometimes and I’m good!

As far a s a like or dislike button and easier to post pics would be nice but the software is so old they can’t fix that.

[dinodino]

Except for the frequent outages, lack of search function, inability to accept credit card donations, etc.

[SunkenCiv]

1. Two-step verification at login -- user name/pw, then a code from the text msg the system sends to the user's mobile phone. NOT email, additional email accts are easy to find. The mobile phone number would be unique across the system, and not re-assignable, but would be able to be changed when the user changes phone numbers. But each phone number would be permanently associated with just one nick. Period.

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2. We should be able to keep an email address attached to our acct's, and given the option of making it visible. The email or the mobile phone would be way we could get reset if we lose our passwords.

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3. The donation screen should be visible to members only, apparently that's been the problem with the donation system -- it's open to non-member bad actors.

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4. Easier posting of topics, using just the originating URL; URL would be checked by the system to make sure it isn't the root. Dolts who used to use "drudge.org", or "nytimes.com", instead of the permalinks, would find that it won't work under the new system.

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5. When trying to post a new topic with this URL-first method, forbidden sources (independent, AP, whatever else) would be rejected up front to save everyone time. Also the forbidden list is already kept up to date, but the boom doesn't get lowered until the topic is ready for posting.

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6. When trying to post a new topic with this URL-first method, if the URL has already been used, the user would be directed to the existing topic.

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7. When starting to post a new topic this way, the user would have some arbitrary time limit, say, five minutes, during which anyone else trying the same URL would be notified that a topic is in process.

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8. When starting to post a new topic this way, the software would pull in any excerpt provided in the META tags at the source, but give the user here the option of auto-excerpt as now (but improved, because it has whiskers).

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9. When starting to post a new topic this way, the software would pull in META info for author(s), date, and source name.

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10. Part One: Elimination of TOPIC and KEYWORD, replace with TAGS. The 50 states are listed with "US:" in front of each in the News subforum, and listed without that in the GOP subforum, and those are two separate lists.

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11. Part two: eliminate the subforums, they serve no purpose.

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12. Part three: the links are too long, and the extra chaff serves no useful purpose. "/Focus/" and "/f-" should be eliminated, along with the "news/" "/chat" etc. The new URL format would be the FR domain, slash topic number, slash function ("posts" "replies" and in the case of posting a reply "post"). This alters the lengths of that set of standard links on each topic post, and saves bandwidth with every page served.

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13. Most websites provide useful TAGS right in the META entries of the articles and such that get posted here, those could be fished out when the URL is entered.

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14. The USPS two-letter state abbrev's have been in use 50 years or so, but there are still those who use MI for Minnesota (MN), Missouri (MO), Mississippi (MS), as well as Michigan (actually is MI). That should be cleaned up.

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15. Single letter and single number keywords should be eliminated, and probably banned at the software level. Same goes for "The" "and" "at"...

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16. Source servers that are for blogs (and perhaps server names containing "Sports") would have "bloggers" added to the TAGS.

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17. The current subforums would be trimmed down (we don't need BREAKING, EXTENDED, FRONT PAGE) and the leaner meaner TAGS would have the remaining old subforum names added to the appropriate topics.

[dinodino]

Software is software. Why would the age of the software have anything to do with making changes?

[Cen-Tejas]

I think that every July 4 FR should hold a vote for nominated people that can no longer be mentioned on wingtalks. Nominations can be submitted year round with a deadline of April 1.

I for one have it as a dream to never hear Jane Fonda’s name again. I think it would be fair all around to require a 60% vote in favor to institute a BAN.

[Fungi]

John over at Powereline once said it costs him $900/month to maintain the site. I am sure the $81,000/month request pays John and Chris and the mods, internet costs are another matter.

[ImJustAnotherOkie]

What do you want for nothing...A rubber Biscuit?

[right way right]

I feel the same for FR as I do for our country.
Love it or leave it.

[dinodino]

What do you mean by “for nothing?” Are you suggesting that the donations made by the FR membership are nothing?

[TTFX]

The obvious, most urgent feature is blocking duplicate posts.

[for-q-clinton]

Really so you don’t like to improve either one?

You know you can love something enough to want it to improve and be better.

[Fester Chugabrew]

Being typo-prone, I would like the capacity to go back and make erections.

[for-q-clinton]

That’s a very fair point. I bet there are other ways to limit photos but make it possible to share as needed.

Just thinking outloud...give an alottment of space (or #of photos) per day/week/month...etc...

So it will stop the spammers.

[EVO X]

Except for the frequent outages, lack of search function, inability to accept credit card donations, etc.

You can donate via PayPal with a CC and no PP account is needed. Just click on the link.

[for-q-clinton]

+1 :-)

That has never worked since day 1 of FR.

[for-q-clinton]

+1. That would be amazing.

[for-q-clinton]

I know on the Defold Forum that uses Discourse software, it searches existing threads for like posts. It’s a bit different there as it’s trying to answer technical issues so it’s really helpful as opposed to waiting for someone to help me.

But that could work very well for what you’re suggesting. Before the post goes up, it shows you similar articles. So you can quickly see if it’s already posted.

[Yardstick]

Don’t need photo hosting. Just some basic automatic HTML insertion to make posting photos and hot links easier for non-technical types.

Please no ‘like’ buttons or editing feature.

Search function could be better.

Posting window should show title preview as mention earlier.

Whatever causes the accidental multiple posts should have been fixed years ago.

The window where you type your reply is slightly buggy. It grabs an extra character to the left of the curser when you copy text, so you have to fix it. Annoying but not a big deal.

Website is slow sometimes.

I don’t know where my donation money goes but FR is still a great news aggregator and still has great original content thanks to the interesting posters, so I chip in.

[Myrddin]

Software is software. Why would the age of the software have anything to do with making changes?

Because the underlying operating system, web server and libraries are in continuous flux with security updates. Most of FR is implemented in PERL. Changes to the underlying language implementation and feature support can cripple a large code base.

One of the ugly parts of modern software development is building on a pool of library code from a broad set of contributors. A defect in any of the underlying libraries can break your code. Mandatory fixes to a library can impose a significant re-work of your existing application to deal with the changes.

I retired from 46 years of software development. My project code bases ranged from 250,000 lines of code for a small project to over 4 million lines of code for larger projects. The big ones were spread over 10 different languages e.g. Ada, C, C++, FORTRAN, Java, JavaScript, PERL, shell (Bourne, C, Korn, Bash), PL/SQL, Makefiles and broad sets of newer build tools. Managing the complexity of customer demands as well as security scan demands is a serious amount of work. People who can play at that level and have the security clearances as well are not inexpensive.

Having answered your question, my two "wants" for FR include being able to delete a post I have created or edit one to fix an error. I recognize those are significant tasks as I've done that for my many customers of my career.

[for-q-clinton]

How so? That is quite a bit different and they hosted videos and photos (unlimited).

Maybe Gab is a better example.