See post above
Come to think about it it was about the same time that the jerk spammed our trump family thread with all those repetitive posts.
Did he infect us with a bug?
Just happened here too, where my domain name server can find freerepublic.com, but not www.freerepublic.com. I hardcoded "209.157.64.200 www.freerepublic.com" into my hosts file, and everything works again.