I’m not sure how fast Google picks up FR stuff. I don’t know if FR is feeding an XML site map to google. Every time I search google using the suffix “site:freerepublic.com” it returns a lot of old stuff.
I never use a suffix and it works just fine for me. Of course, I’m on the west coast and a lot of content makes it on FR hours before I see it. I would be interested to know how long it takes.