Hi folks,
Well, I'm finally back on the site after three or four frustrating days of not being able to log in. Thanks much to Tim for putting me in contact with a specific tech at BF who was very prompt and helpful.
For those curious as to the issue, it was related to the new server that BF put online very recently. Apparently for some 'lucky' folks like me, some ISP's take some time to recognize the new IP address for the new server.
I cleared all the cookies and browser history on my system, rebooted my computer, rebooted and reset both my cable modem and wireless router - and still had the problem.
Then I took the suggestion from this thread and changed my DNS servers to the OpenDNS servers. Also cleared and rebooted/reset everything again - still no luck.
Contacted my ISP (one of the largest in the US, and normally very good) and did the usual frustrating battle with their phone tree and after talking with three 'techs' who had no clue what to do, finally got someone who understood the problem and put in a work order to fix it. However, since it was not a general outage, and just one subscriber's problem with one website, the tech indicated that it 'could take awhile'. So I wasn't holding my breath. Then this morning, I let the tech from BF know I was still out and he gave another clue that I hadn't tried before. He had earlier suggested searching for BF on Google, and clicking the link there, as that sometimes rectified the problem. I had done that earlier (and also tried it using BING) and that didn't work either. However this time, the tech mentioned that if that worked, I should delete BF from my favorites list. Aha...! I'm no geek, but it seemed possible that maybe the system continued to associated BF's old IP address with my favorite list link.
So...I first deleted the favorites link, cleared my browser history and cookies again, and went to Google and search on BF. Voila - there it was. So I closed that window and did a normal type-in login to be sure that also worked, which it did. So I'm back on.
Now, due to the timing of all this, I can't say with 100% certainty that deleting the favorites link was the key to all this. It could have been coincidental with my ISP (finally) getting around to recognizing BF's new IP address - but in any event it's fixed.
Now to catch up on the threads I've missed in the interim.