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What if we created a new table called full_article, wrote a perl script to move the full text to the table and then provided a link to the full text in the excerpt. The mods would have the only access to the full text in case there was a discrepancy. This is no different from having a pile of newspapers in the basement.

You know, these rags are really shooting themselves in the foot. I'll bet most of the complaining papers have circulation figs that are declining. FR is at least getting people to look at their product. If they're making a stink, I'll do whatever JimRob asks to keep them off his back, but I think their politics definitely outweighs their business sense. And that's probably why their circulation figs are going south.

Something like that is already in place. Over the next few days I'm going to apply my auto-snip tool to reduce the corpus down to a permissible size. That action will be logged in the edit history of each article. The original body will be available to a select few, which may or may not include more than the moderator staff--depending upon how poorly the auto-snip performs (depending how frequently we'll need to re-snip the article, to select a meatier cut.) Auto-snip only grabs the first few significant sentences, and not with much thought at that.

Later tools could be applied (to new posts as well) to select facts... names and dates... to populate some type of search table. Quotes can be extracted as well. And other tools could be written to monitor changes in the source article and report differences automatically.

These complaints are truely a blessing in disguise. Getting rid of the constraints of the full text operation open many doors for Free Republic. "That which does not kill us only makes us stronger."