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Hmmmm, what could it mean?

If I ran AOL, I wouldn't turn comments back on. Ever. While AOL subscribers, for the most part, leave great, informative comments on my blog, don't get me started on how most of them carry on at AOL News. If AOL staff had a full brain between any of them, they'd either keep commenting turned off or re-enable commenting, but only in Russian or some other incomprehensible to most English-speaking people language.

Coming Soon: New Commenting Experience

Valued AOL News readers, we have heard your feedback and are temporarily shutting off our commenting system as we work to improve the experience for you.

Because the level of discourse is too low for reasonable people to endure. AIM speak, CAPSLOCK!111!, spam, "Yo Mama", personal and political bashing - gosh. The mixture of nastiness, immaturity, and self-serving, self-righteous commenting is somewhere between disgusting and unreadable (we bash each other pretty hard in the non-AOL News world, too, but we're at least we're much wittier about it - and we've learned to TURN THIS KEY OFF and to stop with the AIM speak, already - also, Yo Mama is completely off limits to us, unless we're on 4chan).

There isn't a comment filtering system in the world that can make it better, either - short of adding tons of live, real-time moderators, screening comments, and deleting everything that doesn't meet a certain standard (which would put AOL News moderators on the same level as Chinese forum moderators - that is, babysitters who determine what you can and cannot say at all times), the situation is, quite frankly, hopeless. Which is a shame, since AOL News isn't half-bad...sometimes.

The only way to delete your AOL screen name if you live in the US is to completely cancel your free or paid AOL account (information for AOL UK users is here). The easiest way to do that is to use AOL's online cancel form.

The form was designed to convert paying AOL subscribers to free-of-charge accounts, but it can also be used to completely rid yourself of your AOL screen name.

It's as simple as filling out your name, address, alternate email, phone number, then checking the box next to where it says, If you do not want your account to be converted to free, or if you want to cancel your free account, check here (screen cap).

To keep you from having to click through to my all-purpose post on using the online cancel form to completely cancel your AOL account, here it is:

Paid and free AOL users, just follow these steps...

1. Click this link or copy and paste this URL into your browser's address bar: https://bill.aol.com/SPortal/jsp/notify_fdm.jsp.
   If you're already signed in to AOL, skip to step 3.
2. Sign in with the AOL screen name that you want to either convert to a free account or completely cancel (screen cap). On the next page, answer your Security Question (screen cap).
3. Fill out the cancel form (screen cap). If you want to completely cancel your free or paid AOL account (in other words, you do not want to keep using AOL for free) place a check in the box near the bottom of the form where it says: If you do not want your account to be converted to free, or if you want to cancel your free account, check here (screen cap).
4. Click Submit.

Deleting AIM Screen Names

Mike at Bumped Tek has some excellent how-tos for AOL and AIM users. Among them is how to delete your AIM screen name. The upshot is, it can't be done, but there are a few ways around that:

1. You can delete your AIM name from the AIM client, just to keep yourself from signing into AIM by accident, then wait up to six weeks for AOL to de-activate your AIM name from the system.
2. The other method was discovered in a comment to Mike's post a few months ago: if you live in the UK, you can write to this email address: CancelWSAUK@aol.com, and your AOL or AIM name should be de-activated within a few days (more info here), but this is not known to work for AOL US users, who will just get an email back saying that they must contact AOL in the US.

Question: Can I contact AOL in the US to delete my AIM screen name?

Answer: No. An AIM name cannot be deleted except by the methods listed above.

Get TOSed (rhymes with "Get Lost")?

Mike also mentions getting yourself TOSed to get your AIM name automatically suspended. While neither of us approve of TOSing yourself, it's only fair to put it out there with the other methods, since your options really are quite limited.

To read Mike's post on it, visit this page and scroll down to the Fake “Cancelling” your Aim Screen Name heading for full details.

Question: If I completely cancel my AOL account, will that automatically de-activate my AIM screen name?

Answer: It depends. If you sign into AIM with your AOL screen name, then yes, completely canceling your AOL account will prevent you from signing into AIM with it. If you have a separate AIM name not tied to your AOL account, though, canceling your AOL account will not de-activate it.

Remind me: What's the difference between "canceling" and "completely" canceling AOL?

There are two ways to cancel your AOL account: "cancel it" and "completely cancel it". If you "cancel it", you can keep your existing AOL account, your AOL software, AOL screen name, your AOL email and email addresses for free. If you "completely cancel" AOL, you will lose all of the above. If you want to delete your AOL screen name, you must "completely cancel" AOL.

Not to sound defensive (I think I do, regardless), but I realize that owing to the custom sidebar I created for this blog last week, the blog has looked like a pile of crap in every version of IE ever since.

It was my anonymous contact form provider for Anti-AOL and it's gone and everything on the website is written in Polish and Google Translate can't translate it (when I ask for an English-to-Polish translation I just get Polish-to-Polish). Here's the text:

Witamy.

Informujemy, iz zasoby, do ktorych probuje sie Pan/Pani dostac, sa chwilowo niedostepne.

Edit: Tried Translate again and it was not much better, but slightly more readable this time: it just says something like, "Welcome, the resources you requested are not available right now", which still tells me nothing.

Can anyone explain (in English) what's going on? I had emails stored on their servers and I'm very afraid they got hacked. I last logged in about (or perhaps "less than") a week ago and everything was fine. Please?

Perhaps owing to my advanced age (38), I pulled a muscle carrying about 15 bags of groceries last night so, since I can't do much else, I've been playing around with possible new layouts for anti-aol. In a few minutes I'll put up one I'm testing on my personal journal.

Never mind...I tested the new layout in IE, and...

...while it seems to work perfectly in IE7 and IE8, it breaks in IE6, which 10 percent of you are still using on my blog (today, that will equal over 50 people). IE6 came out in 2001, folks, so it's time to upgrade to XP Service Pack III and install IE8 so I can finally install better layouts. How many more years am I supposed to wait just so I don't drive off 50 of you a day? IE8 will help you AOL software users have a smoother, better, and safer browsing experience until you can finally remove AOL, since your AOL software uses whatever version of IE is on your computer to display web pages. Please get cracking.

Total AOL layoffs stand at about 18,765 people (see list below, fully updated), from a high of 20,000 to my estimate of 24,000 employed by AOL in its heyday.

This is my personal, fully updated list of AOL layoffs from 1996 to 2010. The chart I've included is an amalgam of three older charts: my last chart, which was built off of Owen Thomas' in late 2007, and Alley Insider's Nov., 2009 chart.

Mine are the only charts which count the pre-2001 layoffs and many layoffs that Owen didn't check into, giving you a much more complete picture. This chart also corrects Alley Insider's Nov., 2009 AOL layoff chart, which incorrectly predicted 2,200 layoffs for Dec. 2009.

My first chart (the one I made in 2007) also incorrectly counted a 2005 layoff as happening again in 2006, and counted one Dec. 2006 layoff as happening twice (I hate sloppy editing!), so I've fixed the chart and the list that follows it to correct those errors as well.

(Click chart or click here for full-size version)

Since it's unusually cold in my neck of the woods, and since I hate being cold, I've been staying inside with the heat up around 82 degrees and a copy of every public filing AOL made in the last three months in front of me. The more I read them, the more uncertain I become. I think what's got me feeling most uncertain is Tim Armstrong's math. Take the layoffs. Please. They save the company not $300 million in the first year, as advertised...try maybe $64 million. Here's how...

It's not easy to cancel AOL - especially if they can't even get your address right. Take tonight's anonymous commenter, who lives in Washington DC, but can't find Washington, DC on AOL's online cancel form in the state drop-down portion of the form's address field. I screen-capped the proof right here:

Before I get into who can leave comments (that's "anyone"), I want to thank everyone who added me to their Friends lists last month after my blog was mentioned in LJ News, and I also want to thank the people who will be discussed briefly in this post.

Just 2 steps if you're signed into AOL, just 3 if you're signed out!

AOL UK users must use this online form. AOL US users can use the online form linked to below.