It’s the NSA tracking bug. Don’t worry. You’re not doing anything wrong, are you?
“Asterisk” has been discussed to death on FR. You could have done a search. The field was all filled out for you! :-)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/search?m=all;o=time;q=quick;s=asterisk
Apparently, we have an Asterisk here on FR.
Doesn’t post much.
http://www.freerepublic.com/~asterisk/
It can easily be replaced with a “FReepathoon” or “donate to FR” ascii string, no problem.
Would a “hashtag” be more to your liking?
#donatetofreerepublic
You are overlooking the elephant in the room.
The FR search function is probably the worst in any computer program anywhere and seldom is useful.
I apologize if this is a repeat; didn’t read the entire thread.
I strongly suspect the asterisk is in the search field because: 1) it is the wild card character for SQL. 2) The view you see for Latest Posts is simply a search, ordered from most recent that includes all posts, thus the wild card.
Because Babe Ruth did it in a fewer number of searches.