I am well aware of those bannings. However, Romney supporters were still a very small percentage of Freepers - there was much more support for the various ABR candidates, and Romney had a hard time getting over 30-35 percent support in the early primaries.
The “dude” has crickets when it comes to its original claim. There was a flood of relatively recent accounts who praised Mitt and perished. Like you said that was still a minority, and in no way represented old timers.