Heres the story.

ADSL offered me a GREAT deal. I take the deal but realize that I better drop my cable account before the next billing cycle. So I hook up a modem and search the yellow pages for a good isp. (My ADSL modem has been mailed to me from my new ISP)

I cant find anything local that is decent price wise, so I decide to take advantage of an AOL disk I got in the mail a L O N G time ago.

Pleasantly surprised I was to be offered 3 months free.

NOT happy to find out that I HAVE to have thier crap software on my computer eating my resources in behind my own preferred browser, NOT happy to have spyware constantly triggering my firewall and NOT happy to have excessive popups without even being on a website.

IMO the biggest POS CRAP JUNK BS ISP on the entire planet.

Anyone else ever deal with them? Am I over reacting here?? :angry:

Ya I tried that crap when I first started the internet because there was no other ISP in my area then. You just brought back nightmares.

Now I have cable and looking forward. :D

nope, you're not, it's just as crappy as you said, and then some

it was the first isp i ever used, and i still have nightmares, it's buggy as hell, at least was back then, their parental control features they push so heavily is a joke, it's way too easy to circumvent if you know what you're doing, too much spam, bloated to hell and back browser you're forced to use, need i continue? aol = aohell

And to think... I actually liked them at one "phase".. hahahahh... AOL does have its own selling points, however with people getting more and more comfortable with using custom build systems, the desire to use a strict UI for browsing and e-mail is less then loved. :(

I hated the BS Spyware, usually in the past I havnt ran a firewall, and so I was testing out a few and with every firewall I installed, their BS shit was always calling home, plus I was getting subseven backdoor blocks all the time. I figured hey I aint paying for this so, everytime it would come towards the end of my free period I would call them up and say hey your piece of crap is messing up my computer, I would huff and puff till they would give me more free months.. I used their service for just over 9 months without ever having to pay a dime for it. Then I moved and cancelled them for good.

I first joined AOL in 1990, and after waiting 6 months for them to get their "9600" lines they kept promising, (I had a 14.4 modem at the time) I quit and joined a local ISP which already had 28.8 lines in place. Seems AOL is still promising the world, but all you get is spam! 90% of my brother's AOL e-mail is spam. Almost as bad as my ISP, PacBell!

I used to use AOL. I rememeber when each tiem they would come out with an update, I would get really excited at the new look! It was great...until I started trying to surf the net. Using INternet Explorer(minimizing AOL) is even faster. Then those idiots cancelled my account because I sent an email to a few of my buddies(like 10 of them) and they claimed it was CHAIN MAIL or SPAM. I couldn't believe it...and man were my parents pissed.

Now, my mom has signed back up with them, and she uses AOL, while I use Earthlink(which sucks too).

You spamming?? I would never have believed it :P
JOKE!!!

Yes, AOL are perhaps the biggest piece of crap ISP running- and its probably their popularity that made them that way. If you watch an AOL ad on TV, they either make me want to puke cor smash the set up, they make a BIG song and dace of their ever growing userbase, they don't mention the fact that they protect spammers on their own networks. I went through a period of recieving 10 - 20 emails a week through my various email accounts all from AOL accounts (Usually "bounce" accounts), they were the hardest to stop. In the end i had to block all incoming mail that wasn't in my address book. The paerental features are so poor an 8 year old could circumvent them (Was called to house where an 8 year old had done just that!) and their software is buggy as hell. As their userbase grows their services will continue to deteriorate, hopefully to the point where they are taken down by trading standards or whom ever controlls the standards of services in your particular neck of the woods. The sooner the better if you ask me.

BTW: This is just MHO

Hehe :)

Really, I don't know what all the fuss is about, I mean I like going through a middle-man to get to the net, I like my stuff filtered 'cause I am not responsible enough to come to my own conclusions, I like being asked if I want to buy/sign up/etc. whenever I log on, I like not being able to access certain sites because of browser limitations, I like the respect I get when I say in newsgroups/chatrooms that I am an AOL user, I like having my news force fed to me, etc. I REALLY like the little man inside my computer that tells me "You got mail!" when I have email and all the friends that I have made in the 'Hot Tub Chat for Singles' chatroom that I go to every night for 5 hours.....
:tomato:

:lol: :P :lol:

/JD

LMFAO JD :D

I never used AOL, although I have seen it used by way too many people. My first ISP was Compuserve, which is just as bad.

All I want from an ISP is a decent spec (low latencies, fast transfer rates, no transfer limits), and low cost internet connection. I am perfectly capable of setting up internet explorer, outlook express, mirc, or any of the hundreds of clients which I should be able to choose from. ISPs should adhere to widely accepted standards and specifications. Any OS can support PPP/PPPoE or whatever.

I remember with compuserve, I couldnt set up a handheld to connect, as they forced me to use their own proprietry dialer. I could not access my mailbox via POP3/set up a webmail script/whatever, as I had to use their own crappy proprietory client. The only reason they were able to get away with offering an inferior service is because they were widely known and just as big as AOL at the time.

Their marketting strategy is simply spamming peoples doorsteps with CD after CD of their crap. The average person who wants to try out the 'Internet' doesn't understand anything about open standards, or anything about choosing ISPs, so they go for the one which they happen to have 20 disks from in their bins, or software preinstalled on the computer the purchased from dell/gateway.

Once people have a email address from their ISP, which all their contacts know, once they have set up an established homepage address, even when they realise what a POS the ISP is, they will be reluctant to change ISPs. I was in the same position - changing email addresses would be a disaster, especially as I used it for business and having mail from potential customers bounces wasn't a good idea. I have learned my lesson, if you use an ISP, just use it for intenret access - host email at your own domain, or on reliable free DNS/domain service, same with webhosting.

AOL can brag about their excellent service with built in chat, mail, and censorship. What new internet users do not realise is that all this can be done at no cost through thousands of different software tools. New users believe the 'Internet' is synnonomous with 'AOL'.

Perhaps slightly off topic, but that 'problem' isn't going to be relevant to just AOL. The internet by design is a free and democratic medium for data exchange. Data can be transmitted to any host, it can be encrypted, it can be sent through a proxy with the URL scrambled. It will never be possible to censor the internet beyond very simple and ineffective filters which can be easilly bypassed by anyone with basic knowledge of the internets working - and that's the entire beauty of the internet. That's why attempts by communist governments to set up national filtering firewalls have always failed. 'Protecting' users from freedom of information, and all its 'filth' is no substitute for good education about ethics and morality. And my ethics go strongly against any form of censorship.

I think you sum up my feelings about AOL.

I used Compuserve when it came out ... but now I know better ...

I had AOL two years back, and my internet browser did not work for 6 months! I had to call up AOL every week and only thing they told me was reinstall the AOL adapters, or use the online support which is pretty shitty to me.

Well I had aol for free for about 5 years. They lost my account. I wonder how that happened? No credit card need either. :)

Yea its pretty easy to get around their so called "Protection". Especially websites that are blocked. Just use IE and you can view any web site you want. Or just download another browser.

And if someone blocked IE from going to certain websites then just reset Content Adviser like this:

Just delete:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\Policies\
Ratings]

Now you little two year old can browse through porn all day long. Seeing how most users using aol are dumb asses, including the parents. Thats probally all they have done if even that.

And AOL sucks big time. But at the time I had no choice. Finally 3 months later after i got it i got road runner...what a joke..worst that aol..seriously...

Then i used Netzero...yea i paied $10 to use netzero even though i had aol for free. NetZero is a lot better than aol..

Or u could get hooked up with my isp for $10 month and rule the universe. :)

Yip AOL is Crap, Yip Aol is Junk, Yip AOL is garbage, Yip AOL is Spyware, Yip AOL is BS.

I had aol when I first got my pc, I now call it the ISP for completely computer illiterate who just want to brag that they have the web. Most of the people who have it don't know squat. Everyone starts there so it makes a great starter isp, when you get it and learn about the pc you learn that it is crap.

The main things I don't like about it is the security, I would go to sites and get all these popups and then start getting emails from the sites. The cookie control on it was a joke for this reason.. And when I went to cancel the service it took them six months to stop billing me. They finally did when I called and told them if they bill me for one more month I'm going to file a civil suit against them, I'm sure they were scared lol.

To this day I get the stupid CD's and phone calls asking me to go back. I just use the cd's for coasters and tell the people who call that their service is crap and I woud rather not have an ISP than go back to them ..

so in conclusion aol does suxxx !! I hope they crash and burn ..

Aohell will always be crap to me. Bloated sofware not even worth the free time.