“I am sorry I took the effort to post an article.”
That effort is much greater than pasting a title into the search box and selecting “titles”.
True story.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3367130/posts
I have always loved Free Republic.
However, it really wouldn’t take much to put some validation on the Free Republic submit page.
A little ajax and a quick check could be made that the site isn’t from a banned site and another check to see if the article has been posted using the actual article link. Grief, that second check should be done anyway along with, sorry, that article has already been posted.
FR was cutting edge 15 years ago, but now we have a lot of new tools that could modernize it without loosing the FR look and feel.
I tried with a bookmarklet a couple of years ago that would make it easy to post from any webpage. It worked fine until the FR filter started thinking all the requests to the search page were suspicious and would block it. lol
Anyway, I still enjoy FR, but my visits really are down a lot from the days where I would spend hours to now maybe spending an hour a month.