For the longest time I thought that the site had gone under because every time I went I got the “Cannot find server” error page. But then I talked to someone and they mentioned classmates.com and I asked if they were still around… they said yes. So I tried on someone else’s computer and got through. But I can’t from my house. Not from any of the computers in my house. Not for over a year.
WHYYYY? I have gotten in touch with a lot of old friends through that site and I want to get back to it!
You–YOU?–didn’t know it was still going strong? In my experience the only way NOT to know that classmates.com is still up and running is to not get on the internet and the only way NOT to go to their site is to be very careful what you click so I have absolutely no idea why you have that problem but I’m a bit jealous.
Well at first–like a year ago–I thought that their server must have gone down so I’d try back later. After a few days I gave up and came back in a few months. Still down. Came back in 6 months… still IE says “cannot find server”… so I figured they must have gone under. Then I started hearing people complain about them, and I thought…heeeey and I rushed to check and see if it was there. It wasn’t. It still isn’t.
I get their IP address as 205.188.221.32. Try using that instead of their domain name (I’m sure you know this, but that final period is just punctuation). If you can access that, then it’s a DNS issue, either with your ISP or on your local machine. If you can’t access it from multiple computers, it’s probably an ISP issue.
Odd.
And I would have thought what you said as well… if it weren’t for the fact that I also could not get to it from my laptop when I was in Arizona visiting my mom.
The plot thickens. At ultrafilter’s suggestion, I tried pinging both the domain and the IP:
rapier:~> ping classmates.com 12:28PM
PING classmates.com (65.243.133.81) from 205.252.89.78 : 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from classmates.com (65.243.133.81): icmp_seq=0 ttl=239 time=84.895 msec
Note that it is a different IP address.
I pinged the IP that he gave above and got this weird-ass message:
rapier:~> ping 205.188.221.32 12:30PM
PING 205.188.221.32 (205.188.221.32) from 205.252.89.78 : 56(84) bytes of data.
Warning: time of day goes back, taking countermeasures.
64 bytes from 205.188.221.32: icmp_seq=0 ttl=55 time=1.986 msec
Thanks to the genius of ultrafilter, I am now proudly staring at classmates.com for the first time in over a year!
The problem? Another program I had installed a while back had edited the HOSTS file and blocked out a bunch of sites that it considered to be ad spammers. Classmates.com was one of them. I deleted that line and saved the file and it worked! 
Fixed it. At some point, somethingorother added classmates to her hosts file as a junk site. Removing that entry fixed the problem.
Which program where?
And how do I edit the HOSTS file?
I have the exact same problem.
Thanks.
There’s a file called “hosts” somewhere on your hard drive that acts as a local DNS server. You’ll have to search for it–it’s location depends on your OS–but once you find it, you can edit it in notepad.
I don’t know what program did it.
On my machine, (XP) the HOSTS file was located at C:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc and I just opened it in notepad.