Yes, I did read the links. There are a number of other issues they raise beyond what you’ve pointed out so far, and I will be very interested in what the site administrators say. I hope it’s obvious that I will do what the owners want, and you may have noted that I have posted no more articles on Free Republic since this issue began.
Responding to your other question, “Who gave you the impression that FreeRepublic was a “news aggregator?”(sic)”
A “news aggregator” is a site which contains links to large numbers of news sources and puts them all in one place. Some aggregators such as Google News track all sorts of news; other aggregators are manually run and focus on narrower topics.
Free Republic does many different things but collecting lots of news articles which are of interest to conservatives is one of the things it does.
I happen to think that’s something really good.