That’s odd...
For a control, I traced kristinn’s (Freeper since 1998) comments back to September 5, 2001 before they were truncated:
http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/by:kristinn/index?more=203747
So, obviously, there’s some sort of black hole in the archives once you start going back that far. Maybe there was a hard drive crash or something in the past?
I have a few other theories; but, without further information, a hard crash would be the most likely scenario.
Cheers
To quote Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser...
I decided to see if I could find out how far back the articles on Free Republic’s database go.
When I walked backwards through all the articles posted on Free Republic, the earliest post I can find is:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/516415/posts
Post #516414 has been deleted, and all the posts that I have tried to access below that post number give me an error message of:
“No such file (give_legacy_article)”
So, something had to have happened which deleted all posts and comments before Sept. 4, 2001.
However, it appears that the user database was kept intact (else everyone would have had to sign up again in 2001).
So, that tells me that there’s an Admin out there somewhere on Free Republic who knows exactly what happened to the database.
Jim Robinson would be my pick. Maybe you could ask him.
Another thought occurred to me: Back around the 2000 time frame, Free Republic was getting sued for copyright infringement:
http://www.freerepublic.com/judgment.htm
Maybe Jim decided to dump a bunch of articles and start over. Just a quick guess.
Cheers
I was introduced to Free Republic in September, 1999 when I started a new job.
As I recall, FR was in the process of adopting an entirely new forum software (or developing one) and I suspect that that the new software made the previous "archive" incompatible.
My fuzzy memory suggests that there was also a subsequent major change, but it might have been a serious system crash.