I happened to have the Yahoo board bookmarked anyway, so when I couldn't get through, that was my first stop, to see if it was just me, or if others were having the same problem - which, of course, they were. After that, it was just a matter of bashing my way back in by editing the hosts file to avoid DNS lookups for www.freerepublic.com, which is how it's still running for me. Sigh. Nothing is ever simple, eh? ;)
Good advice, though - bookmark the Yahoo page, everyone...
I've been on most all day thanks to the Yahoo info. Edited my hosts file to get it to work on both browsers I run. But I don't know what "DNS" means -- domain name server?