[conservatism_IS_compassion]

This links to an interesting reply

Your system seems to work. Thank you, I'm sure I'll use that.

The difference between the URL of reply #50 and the URL of the start of the thread seems to be the appending of

?page=50#50

to the thread URL. If that can be generalized, then

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/523109/posts?page=1176#1176

will take us to reply #1176 of that same thread. As it seems to do. Looks good!

[Aliska]

Glad you got that figured out. You took it even deeper than I did! I don't know how I figured it out, think I read something here. I'll try to get back to reading what you wrote in your link. Your links work perfectly. Been a hectic morning.