I had several of the Flyertalk boards bookmarked (MS IE) and the bookmarks performed properly for months. For instance, the main Starwood page was a bookmark and that bookmark took me to the Starwood page. Over the last two weeks, all my bookmarks take me only to the general flyertalk forum list. What has happened? Is it me or flyertalk or some third party?

We haven't done any structural changes in months, as far as moving forums around. What's the bookmark you have for Starwood?

http://www.flyertalk.com/milesfr.shtml is what was in my bookmark folder.

That's just the front page of Flyertalk Miles, not Starwood forum. Here's what you need to use as a bookmark for Starwood:

http://www.flyertalk.com/forumcgi/fo...e=5&LastLogin=

Why would it have changed?

It didn't change. The URL you've provided has always been just the front page of FT Miles.

But the bookmark worked for months. I also have 3 other bookmarks (that all look the same, by the way) that also sent me directly to individual topic pages? Could IE re-write bookmarks? It is confusing to me.

They were all under different names, right? Do the other bookmarks still take you to individual forums?

No, all to the "front page"

The Flyertalk forums section uses frames - you can tell because you'll notice the scroll bar on the right does not extend all the way to the top of the page. When you're in the forums section, what you're seeing is actually one web page on the top that contains the navigation tabs, and a second page below it, which is framed into the first page. This means that your browser is always opened to the "frame page", ( http://www.flyertalk.com/milesfr.shtml ) and the actual page you follow from there is framed in below by the original page.

This causes two problems. First, it makes it impossible to bookmark a page, because your browser technically never leaves the frame page. This is why you may have multiple bookmarks pointing to the same page.

Second, it makes it difficult to refresh pages to view new posts. Even though you can set IE to refresh a page each time it loads, it doesn't always work that way, and you may see an older version of a page that does not contain the most recent posts. When you try to refresh a framed page, you'll most likely be bumped from the forum/post/compose page you're trying to refresh, back to the top-level "FlyerTalk Miles" page.

The solution is to navigate the forums without frames. To do this, right-click on any link (e.g. MilesBuzz, TravelBuzz, Mileage Run) and choose "Open in New Window". This will solve most of the problems that frames create.