What happened to archived posts?

July 24, 2002 | stanz

[stanz]

There used to be a way to access archived posts. Is this still possible? The responses listed under "Comments" don't seem to go back beyond that page.

[snopercod]

Maybe this will help? FreeRepublic: How it looked in 1996! 1997! 1998!

[stanz]

Thanks. Is this the only way to look at posts received, say, about two months ago?

[snopercod]

I wish I could help you, but sad to say, FR has become a "memory hole". In times past, there were various ways to find "stuff" a couple of months old. But no more.

If you know the exact title of the thread, you can find it. Otherwise, it's effectively gone. Anything you want to keep, save it to your hard drive. That's the only reliable way, these days.

As a fun test, type in "coke is it" in the search block, and select "match exact phrase". See what you get.

[stanz]

Thanks for your help. I bookmarked this thread. I guess that's the easiest way to reference it. It's a shame we can't retrieve all the past responses we got from various threads. I used to look up people and information that way.
I suppose I'll have to make a record of titles from now on.

[snopercod]

We used to be able to find "stuff" by doing a google.com search and appending site:www.freerepublic.com to the search terms.

But during the first week in February, 2002, google.com stopped indexing FreeRepublic. IMHO, this was done at the request of:

1. Jim Robinson, due to the LAT/WP lawsuit, or
2. The Washington Post, since they are a paying "member" of google.com and applied legal pressure, or
3. google.com itself, not wanting to get involved in the lawsuit.

Although asked (by me) several times, Jim Robinson has claimed ignorance of the google.com matter. I don't think he's stupid or devious, so I have to assume that he is not liberty to reveal what he knows.

[Dixie Mom]

HotBot super search still works pretty well.

[nutmeg]

Tri-State 'FYI' bump!

[stanz]

Thanks for the bump!

[snopercod]

I tried your HotBot link. As a test, I used my screen name and site:www.freerepublic.com

I only got one hit! Sheesh...google turned up thousands when it was working...