What is white-out anyway?
I have AOL and noticed the board timing out before it could load today so I went straight to the Dope site and saw this message at the top.
I can access the board from the site, just not from my bookmark.
Just a minor hassle, but worth it of course.
So what’s up with AOL?
Whitelisting is a means of saying “I’ll happily accept any and all emails from this user” or even “I’ll happily accept any and all emails from all users at somedomain.com”
The counterpart to this is blacklisting, which says “I flat-out refuse to accept any emails from this user or domain.” and the emails are silently deleted before arriving at your inbox.
Yet another variant is gray - incoming messages suspected of being spam are quarantined until the user reviews them. With my ISP, the for options then are to whitelist/blacklist the sender, or to let it through/delete it this one time without adding it to any list.
Apparently, straightdope.com isn’t on the master AOL whitelist right now, and emails that the board sends to AOL users are being dropped or bounced back.
I’ll leave “What’s up with AOL” for the folks in either Great Debates or The BBQ Pit.
Thanks! I am clueless about these things.
I know I know, but my daughter has been addicted to the AOL teen boards for several years and I can’t break her heart now. They are in the process of converting their boards and opening them up to everyone so there’s hope I can wean her soon. 
You will get more timeouts on the SDMB if you use the built-in AOL browser; it’s horrible.
Use an outside browser for best results.
Moving this to GQ.
TubaDiva
AOL’s built in browser is MSIE. Granted, it has the AOL face pasted on but it is still MSIE.
If you are having problems in AOL getting to a particular website call/email AOL support. There are somethings you can do in the AOL client to clear it out, or at least there were back a couple version ago. You also might want to check your graphics settings in AOL at keyword ->settings->browser settings-> Web Graphics Compression. Set it to never and see what happens. You can also clear your cache on there, I believe (but do not know for a fact) that AOL keeps a seaprate cache than the stand alone IE.
Slee
Thanks for the “white list” answer. I never have problems with AOL or the Dope timing out; this was a first (at least the first in a very long time), so I was just curious about the meaning of the word.
This morning I had no problems so I reckon it was just a fluke.
You can now move this to the pit so everyone can pile on AOL. 