Posted on 09/17/2008 10:28:43 AM PDT by KayEyeDoubleDee
This is what the Nut Roots are doing to WGN-AM in Chicago:
Obama vs. WGN-AMIf you guys in the Robinson family don't get your act together, and get it together soon, then the Nut Roots are going to take down this site, and take it down hard, for the next two months.
The station is coming under attack for offering airtime to controversial author.
by John McCormick and Steven Schmadeke | Tribune staff reporters
September 16, 2008
chicagotribune.comChicago radio station WGN-AM is again coming under attack from the presidential campaign of Sen. Barack Obama for offering airtime to a controversial author. It is the second time in recent weeks the station has been the target of an "Obama Action Wire" alert to supporters of the Illinois Democrat.
Monday night's target was David Freddoso, who the campaign said was scheduled to be on the station from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. Chicago time.
Obama mobilizes rapid response on Web
Campaign targets media when attacks aired By John McCormick | Chicago Tribune reporter
12:32 AM CDT, September 17, 2008
chicagotribune.comMuch of Barack Obama's political success can be traced to a database listing contact information for millions of people, a tool that has proved invaluable in raising record sums of money and organizing a national volunteer network.
Now Obama's presidential campaign is increasingly using the list to beat back media messages it does not like, calling on supporters to flood radio and television stations when those opposed to him run anti-Obama ads or appear on talk shows.
It did so as recently as Monday night, when it orchestrated a massive stream of complaints on the phone lines of Tribune Co.-owned WGN-AM in Chicago when the radio station hosted author David Freddoso, who has written a controversial book about the Illinois Democrat.
You need to do several things to the Free Republic infrastructure and have them in place no later than about October 1; among them:
1) Mirror Free Republic to at least two other physical locations around the country - one on the east coast [Washington/NYC/Atlanta], and the other maybe more central [Texas has some large colo's with backbone connectivity].
Right now, I am seeing only two IP resolutions for "www.freerepublic.com" - 209.147.64.200 & 209.147.64.201 - and traceroutes have them [predictably] on the same physical network [I imagine that they are sitting right next to one another in the same server rack]:
2) Turn off as much of the relational structure at Free Republic as is possible, and return to a strictly flat file structure for as much of the content at Free Republic as is possible.[n - 2] mg-1.a01.mlpsca01.us.da.verio.net [n - 1] 128.242.105.82 [n] 209.147.64.200 The current relational structure is hopelessly broken, and the negotiations between the caching frontend and the relational backend are breaking down multiple times a day.
Again: THE RELATION STRUCTURE MUST BE DISCARDED - THIS IS IMPERATIVE.
[Furthermore, it is vastly easier to propagate a flat file structure to multiple physical sites around the country; trying to propagate a relational structure, in real time, with relatively limited funds for bandwidth, is essentially impossible.]
3) As things really heat up in October & November, I'd consider banning [temporarily] all non-political content, and instituting an aggressive policy of putting on probation the accounts of users who post lengthy, inane, unfocused, meandering, off-topic soliloquies - concentrating instead on promoting the work of people [like Kristinn] who are doing original investigative reporting and who are presenting their results in simple, straightforward, declarative arguments.
Along those lines, I'd move aggressively to upgrade the quality of the moderators who are policing the content at Free Republic - the quality of the moderation is utterly unpredictable from hour to hour - one hour there will seem to be a moderator who "gets it", and the next hour, it's as if that moderator's shift suddenly ended, and we have an utterly clueless moderator in charge of things.
I don't care if you're worried about hurting Granny's feelings if you tell her that she can't moderate for the next two months - we have to get some moderators in here who are up-to-date on current events and who understand the difference between original investigative reporting [regarding e.g. DEM/Obama treason & Bolshevik/Gramscian subterfuge] and the kinds of "Pray for my Kitty who is having feline leukemia chemotherapy tomorrow morning" threads which seem to waste so much CPU time & bandwidth at this site.
Typo...
I’m sure Jim, John and company are way ahead of the game on this. This site has been around for a long time and has seen much worse attacks that Obamalamadingdong can do.
Jim and John, I hope you are reading this thread and taking it to heart.
Free Republic has gone from a place for conservative to hang out to a major disseminator of conservative thought, ideas, news, etc. Free Republic today is essential to the conservative cause.
Please be proactive in protecting Free Republic from left wing attacks. If this means a special FReepathon to buy equipment or pay for colos, then so be it.
Oh yeah! That alternative is a keeper...thanks.
Put me down for a donation over and above my monthly.
I am not the only one having problems getting onto and posting on FR?
Yup, me too.
Sometimes it's on JimRob's end ~ sometimes it's just California.
Double posts don't worry me.
Thank you so much! I now have four bookmarks in my FR folder!
Lets take this first to a primary level, funding.
Freepers of all people should know there is no free lunch.
A simple $5 donation per month by all users will enable Jim and John to have the financial horsepower to do what is necessary to keep Free Republic working.
Anyone using this site, who isn’t a monthly donor or a regular donor is part of the problem. They are Freep Loaders in the same category as illegal aliens in your hometown feeding off your taxes.
For those who have never contributed to keeping Free Republic up and running, please spare us any sob stories about how you can’t afford a $1.25 per week to keep this site functional.
Please go to FR’s home page and click the icon for donations.
A few days ago when the main FR site was down the beta site was posted on the FR Yahoo Group site. Within an hour, after many FReepers got on the beta site and the main site began to come back to life, the beta site was nearly as slow as the main site.
The reason it is not bogged down when some people try it is because there isn’t usually much traffic on it.
It’s not a solution, mom.
I don’t understand all of that technical mumbojumbo but I’d be in favor of banning all of the cat threads completely.
Hearty bump.
I DO BELIEVE
that there needs to be other sites backing up the main on during this critical time.
I wouldn’t choose Atlanta as one location, however, Texas is a good site.
I think some rare conservative city on the East Coast should replace Atlanta. Atlanta is too likely for various kinds of attacks, imho.
Count me in please....I’ll chip in over my monthly amount also.
We need a new infrastructure - you only need "new servers" if you insist on continuing to host all of that relational crap.
A flat file structure [threads stored as 25 or 50 posts per page, in more or less static files on the server] can be served up by essentially worthless hardware [trust me on this - hardware no longer has any value whatsoever].
What we need is:
1) Mirroring in several different physical locations so that the pipe is no longer a non-redundant point of failure which the Nut Roots can choke off at will.I'd leave the current [relational] servers online, in read-only mode, to serve as an archive of older content on Free Republic, and then I'd bring online a new family of flat file servers for the next two months to be able to service what I can guarantee you is going to be an unprecedented level of demand.2) Ditching all of the relational structure and getting back to a simple flat file structure for the next two months.
And I'd ditch every single penny of budget money going into new hardware purchases and target it instead at extra bandwidth for the next two months.
Or it could just be a vanity thing.
Amen brother.
I see a lot of "bruised egos" liniment in FR's future.
I can echo the statements in one brief sentence: Some Moderators are hopelessly inept; PC uber alles, and sucumbing to an avalanche of whines when a poster hits close to home, and effectively so.
I may have missed an important move in your list: Rooting out "sleepers" who may have signed up a year or two ago in anticipation of this election cycle, and limiting new posters to a number of the site's choosing each week (my personal choice would be no new posters until mid-November, but what do I know?)
As someone has mentioned, this should be an interesting thread. I did not understand the specifics of your recommendations, but can grasp the motivation behind them, and the risk we face, specially in view of the spotty and erratic behavior of Free Republic in the last week or so. The "gremlins" continue.
We must also ban the dog threads ~ but not the polar bear, panda and maneating tiger threads.
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