Free Republic

Howdy everyone, Are you ready for another FReepathon? Good news: John and Tami negotiated a new contract with our bandwidth supplier and got our bill lowered a couple thousand per month! Our monthly expenses are now totalling just under $20,000, so we're setting the target for this Freepathon at $60,000. We have approximately $18,000 (and growing) per quarter coming from our monthly donors so we will only need to raise a little over $40,000 this time. Hopefully, we can do this in a week to ten days. We went over the goal last quarter and we used part of the...

The Free Republic server will be down briefly tonight. John is adding yet another server to the system to better handle the load. He'll have to bring the system down for about five minutes during the installation process. This should happen sometime within the next two hours. Hopefully, the system will only be down for about five minutes. Just enough time to make a pit stop.

<p>There have been way too many vanities lately. The news forum is being overrun with them. We have been spending a lot of time moving them to the General Interest ("Chat") forum. With the increased volume we have seen with the war starting, we have been missing mail and other moderator duties, such as zots. So, here's some guidelines for vanities. Of course, there are exceptions to these guidelines. We have seen some great vanities.</p>

<p>Did you know that any Free Republic topic can be a sidebar for you? Did you know you can remove any sidebar that you currently have? Did you know you can control how many posts show up in each sidebar, and what order the sidebars show up on your latest posts page?</p> <p>I have compiled this thread to help make the task of managing your sidebars easier.</p>

Hi I Am SmokeyWelcome to my establishment!

<p>It is obvious that we are going to need some sort of guidelines regarding the posting of pictures of the brutality of war, such as those broadcast by Al Jazeera today.</p> <p>As always, our first preference is that people use common sense, discretion, and show courtesy to others. We are not going to define any hard rules here, but instead give some guidelines.</p> <p>If in doubt as to if some picture should be posted on Free Republic, don't post it. Instead, link to the picture.</p>

<p>I recently upgraded the program (AWStats) used to generate the Website Usage pages. The old pages, though built with the new program, utilized the old format database which did not provide some fields. Those fields will be 0 or not present on the older reports.</p> <p>For some reason the reports switched to GMT some months ago, I switched back to PT this month. Each switch fouled the "Hours" graph for the month of the switch.</p>

<p>It is not considered Loose Lips if major news media are reporting it. It may be planned disinformation to confuse the enemy. Do not post information you have regarding our military that is not from major news sources, including personal knowledge you may have from military sources or personnel.</p>

Welcome to Free Republic!Yesterday, I had the pleasure of writing the following:Yesterday was, by the measure of distinct posters, the busiest day ever in the history of Free Republic, as 4,282 distinct usernames posted. Fan-freepin'-tastic. This beat the previous record by a dozen or two.Even more impressive, yesterday was the busiest day in the history of Free Republic as measured by total articles + replies, with a whopping 31,153. The previous record was somewhat below 30,000.Signups had their 8th highest day ever, behind 7 consecutive days after the 2000 elections. I am happy to say that yesterday was even busier,...

<p>Yesterday was, by the measure of distinct posters, the busiest day ever in the history of Free Republic, as 4,282 distinct usernames posted. Fan-freepin'-tastic. This beat the previous record by a dozen or two.</p> <p>Even more impressive, yesterday was the busiest day in the history of Free Republic as measured by total articles + replies, with a whopping 31,153. The previous record was somewhat below 30,000.</p> <p>Signups had their 8th highest day ever, behind 7 consecutive days after the 2000 elections.</p>

<p>It is imperative during this time period that no one and I mean no one post any information they have about our military. There have been several postings tonight giving information about bases near where they live -- please do not discuss your local bases on the open forum.</p> <p>Our men and women of the Armed Forces are in harm's way enough without our telling people what is going on in our areas. Please think before you post. Keep your mouths shut about military activities in your area that are not already in the press.</p> <p>Thank you much!</p>

There have been too many duplicate threads lately. A search is easy to do, but is not 100% foolproof, nonetheless, it is very effective. The Free Republic search feature only looks at words in the title (words from within the article will not work). That is why it is imperative to use the original title. To avoid having duplicate posts, prior to posting an article, search a keyword from the title only. The main search page can be found here:SEARCH The best method to search is to pick a key word or two from the title. If the article you...

<p>Yesterday was, by the measure of distinct posters, the busiest day ever in the history of Free Republic, as 4,282 distinct usernames posted. Fan-freepin'-tastic. This beat the previous record by a dozen or two.</p> <p>Even more impressive, yesterday was the busiest day in the history of Free Republic as measured by total articles + replies, with a whopping 31,153. The previous record was somewhat below 30,000.</p> <p>Signups had their 8th highest day ever, behind 7 consecutive days after the 2000 elections.</p>

To All Posters of Articles, News, and Announcements, etc: For the duration of the war on Iraq, we would like to reserve the "Breaking News" category for news items that are pertaining to truly breaking news stories. Please post other news stories to Front Page, Editorial, Extended, or News categories as appropriate. For the time being, please post announcements or news of rallies, chapter events, radio shows, TV shows and other items that are normally allowed in breaking news to Activism, Announcements, Free Republic, News, State categories, etc., as appropriate. Please try to keep vanity posts or personal posts to...

<p>Pretty much everyone knows that things are about to get quite busy. Whenever this happens, people make suggestions such as "don't post graphics, so as to help Free Republic handle the traffic".</p> <p>As such, NOT posting graphics helps Free Republic handle the load not at all. It does not take much bandwidth, at all, for the server to spit out that small amount of text.</p>

Hi all.When posting articles, please limit the topics to those which are apparent for the article. Do not go out of your way to put in more topics just to try to get more views for your thread. Doing so makes the topics less usable for everyone.Possibly the worst examples can be found in the "Activism" topic. I think just showing some examples here will make the point:Gov:(Mitt Romney of MA) Budget will change, taxes promise will not was posted to Activism. It is understandable that the poster wanted to see some activism result from the article, but this is...

Hi everyone.As you can tell, we are still experiencing some operating difficulties. As John works to fix the problem, certain features may not work or may behave strangely.One thing that has been happening is that due to a (hopefully temporary) change in the way the system caches some information, posts may not show up right away. Do not remake posts, as this will just lead to duplicate replies.Also, do not hit abuse and ask us to remove your duplicate replies. There simply are too many of these requests coming in for us to manage. You will have to live with...

<p>Since my last vanity announcement on keywords went so swimmingly (it ended up with something like 5000 keywords added to it) I thought a great idea would be to throw some propane on some other fires with a vanity.</p> <p>Breaking news is being abused again, big time. This goes in cycles, with sometimes people being responsible, but other times people not being very responsible.</p> <p>We are in one of the not-very time periods.</p>

There have been many duplicate threads lately. A search is easy to do, but is not 100% foolproof, nonetheless, it is very effective. The Free Republic search feature only looks at words in the title (words from within the article will not work). That is why it is imperative to use the original title. To avoid having duplicate posts, prior to posting an article, search a keyword from the title only. The main search page can be found here:SEARCH The best method to search is to pick a key word or two from the title. If the article you are...

<p>Is this thing on? Plug in that cord over there. Yes that one. NO NOT INTO THAT PLUG yes that one. Thanks. Testing 1 2 3.</p> <p>Hi everyone. Your friendly neighborhood AM here.</p> <p>Keywords. You've seen them. You love them. Maybe you have even abused them.</p> <p>Please don't abuse keywords. There are children in China doing without keywords.</p> <p>1) Having who added what keyword be revealed at the whim of sadistic moderators, such as myself.</p>