Free Republic

Testing, please ignore :-)

Hi all, We're planning a major overhaul of the way the site uses forums, topics and keywords. In short, we're going to flatten out the structure, merging those three distinct indexes into a single index and reorganize some URLs. What we'll end up with are articles with one or more "categories." Basically a hybrid forum, topic or keyword. Comments and articles will be associated with a Primary Category (or Home Category?) which is similar to how they are associated with a forum now. You can browse comments in a Primary Category just as you would browse comments in a forum...

Bugs? Weird stuff? I've made significant changes to the underbelly, I believe all the bugs are ironed out, but, who knows? I'll keep an eye on the crash log, and if you see anything that really shouldn't be, please let me know here or via Freepmail. Thanks.

I've introduced a new feature. If it works without killing us all I'll extend it to keywords.

<p>I'm going to convert bump lists to keywords and discontinue that form of addressing. This will only affect you if you know what a bump list is. Thank you.</p> <p>Update #1 within the hour pings to bump lists will fail to register. Tick tock...</p>

Ack! That's what I get for not using transactions.

<p>Just changing a lightbulb. Hopefully will fix the server errors experienced recently.</p> <p>Correction: Free Republic will briefly be unavailable between 3:00 and 3:10 AM PST, if at all. I dropped the lightbulb.</p> <p>Honestly, just 5 more minutes...</p>

<p>CHANGED General Interest now General Interest (Chat).</p> <p>I added color to the sidebar, tell me (politely!) what you think.</p> <p>Lots of misc. things under the hood.</p> <p>There are a bunch of add'l changes/additions I'd like to make, and this is probably not the last update today. I'll update this thread if so.</p> <p>You can now search by time or relevance from the latest posts. And it remembers what your last search was and defaults to that. So NOW order by time can be your default search setting.</p>

I've disabled the custom "STYLE" feature of our profile pages until I can properly implement a CSS safe-filter. I've learned that Microsoft, in its infinite wisdom, had extended style sheets to incorporate scripted elements. Scripting can be abused and may lead to identity theft or worse.

Some members of the open-source community are claiming that the SCO Group may have violated the terms of the GNU GPL (General Public License) by incorporating source code from the Linux kernel into the Linux Kernel Personality feature found in SCO Unix without giving the changes back to the community or displaying copyright notices attributing the code to Linux. A source close to SCO, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told eWEEK that parts of the Linux kernel code were copied into the Unix System V source tree by former or current SCO employees.

Hack attack! Taking down criminal media sites by lulu 1:33am Sat Mar 29 '03 (Modified on 10:05am Sat Mar 29 '03) The war-makers are routinely hacking anti-war sites. Activists can, and probably should, use the same tools to bring down the criminal corporate media websites. A basic principle long embedded at the core of western legal systems is the right to use force to protect oneself, family and community from harm. Bush has gone to war to "protect" America, that's how unquestionable the right of self-protection is. But Bush fabricated an enemy. He is running a protection racket, just...

<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>UPDATE 3:20am -- almost had the system back online at the scheduled 3am. Unfortunately, I ran out of time, so will need to schedule another hour tomorrow night.</p> <p>We're planning a couple hours of downtime tonight for database maintenance. We're going to take a complete backup of the data files, reindex them, then reimage the slave servers, which should improve the overall performance of the system. During this time, the web server will be down.</p>

Yikes! I missed the final topic list proposed some time ago. I've updated the database with the new topics. Have a look. (I left the "General Discussion" topic in place for the time being.)

Is anybody interested in a structured debate program? My idea is to model one of the standard debate formats. Probably vaguely resembling "Team Policy" as it is the only one I know that lends itself to an online adaptation. Team Policy DebateTeam policy debate is the oldest, and still probably the most popular, format of debate practiced in American high schools.  The proposition side is called the Affirmative or Aff, and the opposition side is called the Negative or Neg.  Each side is a team composed of two debaters, so that there are four people participating in the debate (not...

In my spare time :-) I've reimplemented the "My Comments" (self-search) routine. It should now provide a "More" button back to November of last year. Previous implementations where hampered by a severe MySQL bug, which required a somewhat buggy workaround, which sometimes failed to notice very old comments. I've since upgraded MySQL, and as a test of the new code, I've reimplemented "My Comments". There are about a dozen of my workarounds which will need to be reimplemented once the new "My Comments" code proves itself. This will affect anything which lists a large number of entries in reverse order....

I've made a few changes to the forum software with respect to posting articles. These changes will facilitiate FR's compliance with the terms of the LAT/WP settlement. Jim now has the capability to add actions based on the source URL entered on the post article form. Such 'Source URL Actions' (SUAs) include: forcing excerpts of material This will be triggered mostly on the LAT/WP owned URLs, and only on articles that do not have the new "This is an excerpt." box checked. When triggered, the posting program will issue an alert similar to "Washington Post articles must be excerpted." The...

Apparently some version of AOL Browser does not handle PNG graphics at all, and instead prompts to download them. Either the same browser, or another, invokes RealDownload on the PNG graphics each time they're displayed. I removed the PNG graphics from FreeRepublic until I can find a more acceptable format. GIF graphics are encumbered by patents, the patent holder requires a royalty payment for each graphic generated, so that isn't a go. Will probably end up with JPG graphics. Sheesh.