Liberty Post - NEWISH
IN APPEARANCE Liberty Post is the closest to Free Republic, though its management team insist it's all their own work! To begin with, LP was almost entirely an anti-freeping site. Complaints about Robinson's site dominated the Latest Posts section on an hourly basis. However, most of the hardcore anti-freepers have been banned one-by-one and anti-freeping - such as it is - is conducted in a section called The Biker Bar.

The popularity of LP took a hit recently when many posters defected to Freedom Underground (see below) but it's still the first stop for any banned Freeper. So-called "flying monkeys" from FR regularly stage raids on the forum to troll the site but invariably they return better behaved months later when Robinson bans them.

Liberty Forum
JOHN DEERE'S forum gets far more hits than Liberty Post but Freepers don't like it because they say it is anti-semitic. And it has to be said, the Middle East flame-wars on LF are not for the faint-hearted. What LF does have going for it is that it has private messaging so Freepers can lurk there for months without posting.

LF recently signed a partnership with Free-Market.Net which has strengthened its support. Surprisingly, LF still does not ask its posters for financial donations. With a membership approaching 2,000, LF has grown immeasurably since it went public last summer.

Freedom Underground - NEW
AMUSINGLY NAMED "FU" is a spin-off from a spin-off. It mainly consists of anti-government posters who left LP because they didn't like the new flock of "Bush-bots" who had come over from Free Republic.

FU is run by poster "unamused", who was banned from LP for spamming the forum with foul language. "unamused" designed LP's primitive email system (Leper-Mail) so he had ready access to its members and was able to poach them.

Reunion Reformation - NEWISH
THE REUNION site has undergone many reincarnations and rose out of the ashes of a "Delphi" forum called Reunion, which was run by banned FR poster "Arator". When "Arator" went running back to Jim Robinson, poster "Flem Snopes" started his own forum on Delphi.

After Delphi outlawed RuR a year ago it was forced to find new lodgings. Its main claim to fame is that FR's most notorious poster "Eschoir" is a regular visitor.

Original Dissent - NEWISH
PROBABLY the furthest to the right of all the FR spin-offs, OD seems to be gathering momentum and has undergone several technical upgrades recently. It is home to many banned FR posters, plus refugees from the old Reunion site and the now defunct Sam Francis forum.

Democratic Underground
DU is the Liberal "antidote" to Free Republic. Its message board isn't as user friendly as FR's and it has also been accused of over-moderation. Many Freepers post there under fake names and then run back to FR to file tedious reports to the big cheese - which are usually deleted instantly by Jim's moderators.

Lucianne.com
BY NO means new, this long-established Conservative forum is nonetheless worthy of mention because it continues to get huge hits. Owned by literary agent, Lucianne Goldberg, its "Shortcuts" are updated four or five times a week, unlike Jim's tired homepage, which is updated about as often as his son John posts at FR - ie rarely, if ever.

Vast Right Wing
HEAVEN knows what happened to this place! Not so much "vast" as "vanished", the forum once had a popular chat room called "The Alley". The last time we looked at its sister site The News Forum, we got the message, "We're moving - Please visit us soon." Webmaster "Navigator" was recently banned from Free Republic so should have a bit of time on his hands to add to the six words which currently constitute the entire content of the site.

Strike the Root
FAST-GROWING forum set up by a banned Freeper, Strike the Root relies on $100 donations from its members. It boasts an impressive series of links and contains original content as well as its message board.