[general_re]

Make sure you save it as "hosts" with no extension. Notepad defaults to saving it as "hosts.txt", but that won't work - it has to be just plain "hosts". Anyway, that works just fine as a temporary fix - that's how I'm here. Of course, if you didn't already know how to do that, you probably can't get to FR to read about it at the moment ;)

So anyone with this problem who doesn't know about the Yahoo board is sitting in the dark right now. Plus, people trying to find FR for the very first time will fail as well, with no idea why or how to work around it. Plus that will break if/when FR changes IP addresses. And so forth, so hopefully this will be resolved - get it? ;) - soon.

[Lady Jag]

To a stumbling bloke like me who read the Yahoo host edit instructions and managed to make it work, what happens when FR changes its DNS? Will we again be unable to log onto FR?

[Tolik]

Yes, you are absolutely right. I remembered about the yahoo group and searched for it to find the advise that was there of course. 15 minutes of withdrawal were hard :))

[LibWhacker]

Notepad defaults to saving it as "hosts.txt", but that won't work - it has to be just plain "hosts".

Strangely, my Notepad saved it without an extension, but I'm not looking any gift horses in any mouths, lol! Also, I did have to edit the host file before I could log in. Manually entering http://209.157.64.200 in my browser wasn't good enough. It let me see FR, but I still couldn't post or log in. I had to edit the hosts file to do that. Weird.

After you save, www.freerepublic.com should work normally, at least until the IP address changes, in which case remove the entry or update it with the new address.

This worries me because a year or two from now I doubt very much I'll remember all this.