[John Robinson]

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."

[\/\/ayne]

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.

That sounds perfect for right now, but I believe FreeRepublic should become a regular newspaper that can pay for articles. We could excerpt normally but pay for the really important ones. All this can be spelled out in the posting page. Not everyone would understand, but enough people would get it and most would only post the whole article on the really important ones.

Note: Fundraising idea - Freepers are great writers - can some that are experienced authors write a book about the phenomenon of Free Republic itself and donate the proceeds? I'm sure it would be a best seller!

[mo]

Have you looked into distributed servers using P2P technology? I'm not a computer guy, but there may be ways to archive and retrieve in cyberspace that do not involve owning and operating a file server.