AOL?
I hear lots of bad stuff about it, but have never used it, or even seen it. I got an offer in the mail, 150 free hours…blah blah, but was told to steer clear.
What is the difference between AOL, and other whatevers ? (ISP’s?)
Why is it so bad?
They kick you off at regular intervals, lots of busy signals, slow connections,lose your email, plus they felch aardvarks.
I don’t have to do drugs to mess up my head. I went to Catholic school.
And the aardvarks aren’t too happy, either.
That reminds me of something I thought was kind of funny a while back; I’m on AOL but I can’t tell if that was the problem or not. Anyway, I sent an email to a friend’s (hotmail) account, and the thing took 10 DAYS to get there. I had attached a file, which was missing by the time it got there (it had a note on it saying “empty file attached” or something like that).
What’s up with that?
I must be the only person in the world who’s never had a problem with AOL. Heck, the only reason I want to get rid of it now is cuz we have this new-fangled cable modem, and it came with two or three different ISPs…so we really don’t need AOL anymore. We’re just keeping it around cuz Byron’s too lazy to send a mass email telling people about a new address.
“…being normal is not necessarily a virtue. It rather denotes a lack of courage.”
[li]They deleted my 2 page wonderpage.[/li][li]From 3:00pm to 11:00pm, it’s always busy (even though they say they put up new numbers everyday :mad: )[/li][li]It always crashes when I open a web page using the AOL browser.[/li][li]I kept on getting harassed from the “age/sex/pic” morons.[/li][li]It’s $4 more expensive than my current ISP[/li]
Oh, I can go on, but I just want to forget all those bad memories with AOL.
[li]It’s $4 more expensive per month than my current ISP[/li]
…and remember, duct tape fixes all your problems, big and small.
Poor service.
Poor access.
Nonexistent customer service.
Content deleted with very short notice, and no amount of customer complaints will accomplish anything. Steve Case is much too busy challenging Opal for world domination to care about what his customers think.
They cancelled the Straight Dope. Now is there any ISP that caters more to the element of society which could benefit the most from a little bit of ignornace-fighting? I ask you!!!
Bottom-line: AOL is vanilla. Not French vanilla. Just vanilla. It’s fun to feel superior to vanilla.
Whatever.
But the BoxerJam games, especially Strike-A-Match kick butt. So here I am…
Sue from El Paso
- Siamese attack puppet - Texas
Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.
AOL the corporation is hated for many of the same reasons that Microsoft is. It’s a big corporation that has successfully managed to dominate a market, it has a reputation for going for the “common denominator” and ignoring the niches, and it’s less responsive than some smaller companies to customer complaints.
AOL users are frequently hated because of a sense of elitism by users of other ISP’s.
And now the Web TV users are at the bottom of the pecking order.
Lynn
The world is coming to an end. Please log off.
AOL is the biggie corporation that aims at the casual user who isn’t very computer savvy (ahem…like me) which delivers lousy service that computer dweebs (“ahem” repeated) accept out of supine laziness.
My greatest, loathed, froth at the mouth frustration was AOL’s blithely dumping me offline without notice. (The timing varied with busy periods; no comfort when you’re almost through a brief post and get bumped for the 3rd #$$*&&^ time.)
This has eased since I found a nify software fix that basically runs interference for me. It tells AOL that I’m here, active, bright eyed and bushy-tailed and stops Big Brother from dumping me.
Briefly, AOL is the corporate gollem that feeds on the unsophisticated drones who lack the time/energy to learn enough to stop serving the monster.
Veb
and it stands for: America On Line. even the name sucks…
bj0rn
MajorMD:
You don’t need AOL to play BoxerJam games. Just web access.
Iceland On Line would be better ?
Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wants to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion.
–Writer Ron Hubbard in 1949 who later founded the Church of Scientology
Ah, but the good Major likes to play the prize games and get her name on the list (she was 5th last night.) They don’t have those on the net yet.
Sue from El Paso
- Siamese attack puppet - Texas
Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.
My only complaint with AOL is getting kicked of after X minutes of inactivity. Well, I also hate their stupid browser, but I just bypass it and use Netscape. I don’t believe any of my e-mail has been deleted, lost, delayed, or misdirected. I tell the age/sex/pic folks I’m fat and married and they go away. And I haven’t had a problem connecting regardless of time or day. I almost always connect on the first try. If it’s busy or not connecting, the second number usually gets on. I can’t recall ever not being able to get on.
Maybe I’m a braindead loser, but AOL works for me. Maybe another ISP would be better, but I fear change.
“I hope life isn’t a big joke, because I don’t get it,” Jack Handy
BTW, using another browser like Netscape means that if AOL does dump you for some reason, whatever you’re posting won’t be lost. Netscape will still be open and you can pick right up where you left off when you log back on AOL. Yay Netscape 
“I hope life isn’t a big joke, because I don’t get it,” Jack Handy
The post above that says Majormd was actually posted by me, I don’t want people to think Sue has started to refer to herself in the third person.
PUN
Gotta remember to switch names…
Well, I hate AOL because of that bracka-frackin’ “use compressed images” (or something like that) checkbox that is apparently checked by default and means that every freakin’ client will call and say, “My site doesn’t look good anymore, the graphics look all spotty…what did you do to it?” Grrrrrr…haven’t seen 5 yet but I’m hoping they take that idiotic carp-felching feature and shove it up their collective arses.
Mmm, that felt GOOD.
“Where do you lurk? I shall come and chivvy you out like an old stoat.” Anthony Blanche
Well, aside from the many and varied ways that the AOL user experience sucks, I’ve noticed online games don’t like AOLers because:
- The ping times are atrocious. Games are unbelievably choppy with AOL folks on the line.
- The random disconnects piss everone off.
And USENET users don’t like aolers because
- Its mostly computer novices who weren’t around when it was actually called USENET, so don’t know all the sometimes arcane netiquette.
1a) A lot of them don’t seem capable of checking a FAQ. - Again, it being relative novices, the comp.* boards get quite a few dumb questions from the AOLers.
I think in the USENET case, a lot of it is selective memory. Everyone asks dumb questions, but since such a huge number of people are on AOL, you tend to remember dumb posters being on AOL, and generalize.
Me, I was on AOL for a while. I wanted a non-local service cause I was planning on moving in the next 8 months and didn’t want to tell everyone a new address. But it pissed me off too much when I couldn’t use eudora, or a real newsreader, and my connection was way slow.
Oh, and the crappy thing was that if you disconnect from AOL, they don’t forward your email. Aargh.