Posted on 06/25/2002 3:42:21 AM PDT by Jim Robinson
The following email is being circulated to our members by various disgruntled former FReepers:
Subject: The Future of Our Free RepublicDear Fellow Free Republic Member,
Many of us at Free Republic are distressed by the extraordinary level of censorship that has been so obviously going on. It is very obvious that individual posts, entire threads, and the entire work of members who have been highly regarded are disappearing into a Memory Hole.
Scores of us have organized an e-mail network that is independent of the communication controls presently, and sadly, being used at our Free Republic. We have carefully documented the unmistakeable evidence that most of the posts, threads, and posters that are vaporized completely are overwhelmingly targeted for their political stance on the Right. These are not Leftwingers. These are not even Middle-of-the-Roaders. These are not disruptors. These are not foul-mouthed delinquents. These are fellow patriots on the Right who disagree with the controllers of FR on specific issues that are now hotly debated by the Right. We have documented that FR will parade before you, as if to hide all of the great posters whose work has been destroyed, a straw-man delinquent that has been banned. This is deceptive.
Treating these fellow patriots on the Right so shabbily is not right. As shabbily as those banned into the Memory Hole are being treated, the most shabbily treated of all are all of the good folks on Free Republic themselves. We came here for honest debate. Free Republic advertised itself as a Forum for honest debate. Without that honest debate...everything at Free Republic becomes shabby.
We can do much better. As a measure of how intense the simmering feelings have gotten among members on this unjustifiable use of deleting, censoring, and banning please link to the following thread. You will notice that one simple and sincere plea from one of our finest members has spontaneously touched off a prairie fire of approximately 500 posts in a mere 18 hours. If it isn't Memory Holed this thread may shoot into the thousands.
If you would like to receive anonymous updates of information concerning the hundreds of Freepers who have networked via e-mail to restore the wonderful honest debate to Free Republic, just drop an e-mail of just one or two words if you like for extreme brevity to:
StopCensoringUs@hotmail.com
And, here's that link back to the snowballing thread at FR:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/704701/posts
Thank you so much for giving your thought to this vital matter for our Internet home.
Sincerely, StopCensoringUs@hotmail.com
That would be Pardek #6.
Well, I'm shattered ... not even an honorable mention as a "government shill" or anything.
I thought I could have been somebody ... I could have been a contenduh!
Hehehehe....
Gotta admit, they do have a pretty good grasp of the "big-government-can-do-no-wrong" All-Stars.
No need to feel slighted, it gets pretty tough for more normal people to be admitted to that Hall of Fame.
OTOH, it is rather sad that these disgruntled malcontents have allowed their personal paranoia to skew their perspective and priorities. Taking potshots at JimRob and FR is a pretty childish approach to relieving their angst. There a far more important issues for adults to discuss.
Yes, as he has been satisfied in the past with the performance of many who are now long gone. With prejudice.
Wait long enough by the river and the body of your enemy will float by.
How many more shoes must die to convince the sceptical?
I've not had a post deleted, but one post to me was. It was vicious anti-Semitic and anti-Christian screed. The scary thing was that several people with posting privileges vehemently protested the ban, because they agreed with the poster.
Jim, you provide a great service. I'm sure this is the thankless part of the job.
Herein lies the rub...some people view the mere existence of the pile of dog crap an affront to the order of the world as they imagine it should exist. Hence, they immediately want someone to pick it up. I would imagine that, they actually wiggle with glee at the idea of being able to ring the abuse button to summon the servants to clean up the mess. "Remove it from my sight!!"...and their world is once again perfect...in their own minds...until they take their next walk.
I had not realized the above before and explains a lot
To be honest in the past had felt the moderator was pulling the trigger way too fast on some innoxiously post and posters and was left wondering what the hell did they do? but didnt even think of a past posts or concurrent alt posts under a different screen names
Let that be a lesson boys & girls: ....All your IP address belong to us
FRillions.
Upon further investigation I have to conclude that the poster was being sarcastic. Still, the sarcasm behind his "abominable comment" was founded on real abominable comments written in earnest by others he seemingly detests. His sarcasm rests, sadly, on permissible FR PC speech.
That about sums up the feelings of most of us. Plus for me personally you nailed 2 of the 3 elements of my own ideological holy trinity..fighting against..baby killing and gun grabbing
Nice work!
They also suffer from a technical problem - one they share with DU - that ensures they could never become a serious threat to FR even if they did start getting any posters. That problem is that their software generates web pages by creating ever-more-nested <TABLE>s for every new comment posted to a thread. This isn't a big deal for a thread that has four or five comments on it, but if it becomes popular and starts getting dozens of responses, so many tables end up getting created that it overloads most web browsers except on the most state-of-the-art, 2-GHz Pentium 4s. I open a long thread on DU and it sometimes takes as long as EIGHT MINUTES before the browser finishes rendering the page. Such "features" guarantee their forums will never have heavy participation levels, no matter what. Plenty of usability studies have shown that the average user will not wait more than seven seconds for at least some readable material to show up on-screen. If it doesn't, they move on to another site.
Making FR's threads table-free is probably the single smartest move JohnRob ever made when it comes to contributing to the success of FR. (Second was cutting threads into 50-post chunks for similar browser-overload reasons.)
If there were such a "campaign",There is no need for the word if there.
The fact that there is such a campaign is without doubt.
is this how you would go about calming it down?By pointing out that it is being instigated, and pointing out who is doing the instigation?
You bet.
I think Jim did the right thing here.
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