I don’t know how they could enforce the mandatory search.
With the keywords, they could just make it a mandatory field, to put in at least two keywords.
People ought to be able to think up that many. Usually the name of the city works. Or the person involved. Or something relating to the topic.
As for the blog pimps, I’d be in favor of someone going through the bloggers and personal forum and looking at the posting history of those posting and if they never or rarely post replies to their thread, just delete them all and free up storage space in the computers. I don’t know how much that would actually accomplish, if it would be worth it, but it just really annoys me to see some people just using FR thinking that they’re going to get hits on their blogs because they posted here.
There are also blogpimps who use their FR homepage to advertise their blogs. That could go as well.
Like this one. Multiple threads a day all linked to its site, very few comments on them in the form of replies.
http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/by:blogeyeblasttv/index?tab=articles
This is the sort of thing I’d LOVE to see go or that should be charged for staying. Enough of using FR as FRee advertising.
The bloggers that irritate me are the ones that post day old news as if it's new and they just thought of their "angle" when Freepers had been posting the same points all day the day before.
“I don’t know how they could enforce the mandatory search.”
It’s already there - kind of. When posting content from some sites it’s searched against a list, and if it matches it’s rejected. That can be tweaked to match addresses of posted pages. Not trivial, not on titles, but doable.
Yes, its annoying when someone makes a post and then never returns. I’ve seen others, besides bloggers do this as well.